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This book examines the manifestations and the origins of perverse fantasy. It gives a convincing account of a distressing psychological condition, of interest both to the specialist and to the general lay reader. By describing and explaining the origins of the problem, it brings clear insights which may well suggest possible new approaches to treatment. Hendrika Halberstadt-Freud illustrates the characteristics of perversion by drawing on the work of Stoller and others, on her own experience as an analyst, on the writings of Freud, and above all on Proust's novel, Remembrance of Things Past, which she sees as a detailed and psychologically convincing examination and illustration of the condition. Halberstadt- Freud teases out an explanation for the genesis of perversion. Searching Proust's fiction for clues, she finds the solution in a pre-oedipal phase during which an over-possessive mother locks her son into a dyad that excludes the father.
Proust's portrayal of childhood focuses strongly on the exclusive relationship between a mother and son, and as such (according to Halberstadt-Freud) is much more central to a study of perversion than the writings of Freud, who concentrates on the oedipal triangle of mother, son and father. Where perversion is to be the final outcome, as Halberstadt-Freud explains, the pre-oedipal mother-son dyad is imbued with aggression and hate. The feeling of symbiosis that the son experiences with the mother is illusory, since in a classic double-bind the mother overtly claims she is exclusively in love with the child, and simultaneously signals her rejection of him by acts of betrayal such as conceiving other children.
Halberstadt-Freud sees the mother-character in Proust's novel as one of these simultaneously alluring and rejecting mothers. Freud, on the other hand, focuses on the rivalry between father and son for the beloved mother and does not acknowledge the possibility that the mother might feel hate for her child. According