Dear Sir:

I would like to thank Dr Grossman for having carefully read my report on the panel ‘Psychic reality and perversions’, and for his comments on it.

I will take up his argument to explain why I wrote in those terms. The difference has to do, I think, with the way in which we understand the word ‘dishonest’.

For me, it implies a conscious action, for example an intentional lie, while the defence mechanisms of denial or disavowal and splitting that are at work in the perverse structures are unconscious phenomena. In his article on ‘Fetishism’, Freud writes:

In the conflict between the weight of the unwelcome perception and the force of his counter-wish, a compromise has been reached, as is only possible under dominance of the unconscious laws of thoughts —the primary processes (1927, S.E. 21, p. 154, my italics).