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And it is to increase my homage that I make distinction neither between ages nor sexes.
A. D. DE SADE, La nouvelle Justine
The ideas in this paper complement certain views that I have expressed in my report (Chasseguet-Smirgel, 1973) and in my book (Chasseguet-Smirgel, 1975) on L'Idéal du Moi(cf. also Chasseguet-Smirgel, 1976b), as well as in the paper 'Perversion, Idealization and Sublimaation' (Chasseguet-Smirgel, 1974). These works, in turn, developed certain points contained in previous papers (Chasseguet-Smirgel, 1966a), (1966b), (1969), (1971b). Some of the ideas developed here have been adumbrated in my Dialogue paper on 'Freud and Female Sexuality' (Chasseguet-Smirgel, 1976a).
It is necessary, to begin with, to recall a proposition which I have already put forward in various of the works just cited, in order to clarify the development of my exposition. To do this, I will start from a statement by Freud (1911) on the two principles of mental functioning:
The sexual instincts behave auto-erotically at first; they obtain their satisfaction in the subject's own body and therefore do not find themselves in the situation of frustration which was what necessitated the institution of the reality principle (p. 222).
My hypothesis is that the demand for sexual satisfaction without frustration is found, in the pervert, transposed from the auto-erotic sphere (where such satisfaction was really possible) to the object sphere, more specifically to the oedipal situation. The segment of reality which is denied concerns sexual reality, that of the difference between the sexes and that of the difference between the generations, the latter governing the former. One of the elements which I stress is the tight connexion which links this double difference; the recognition of the difference between the sexes as decisive for access to reality was proposed by Lewin (1948). This idea has often been taken up especially in the French psychoanalytic literature, in a strictly Freudian f