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Gérard Bonnet is a member of the French Psychoanalytical Association (APF). He has been working on clinical and theoretical aspects of perversion for more than 30 years and has published well-known works on the question in France. New editions of several of these have recently appeared, which confirm their present importance. This new book, which completes and enriches those publications, proposes an original theorization of the functions and mechanisms of perverse forms of behaviour, which he refers, whatever their considerable differences, to “a rigid and highly structured organisational symptom system” (p. 67), the specificity of which he proceeds to define.
His theoretical framework is provided principally by Jean Laplanche, with Jacques Lacan and Guy Rosolato in the background. The fundamental argument is that the scene of primal seduction, which for Laplanche founds sexuality and conspires in the birth of psychical activity, can, in the course of the pervert's childhood, be seen to have been both too exciting and brutally interrupted, leaving the child suddenly alone in a state of total dereliction, with untranslatable, enigmatic messages. This “radical frustration” is seen to have simultaneously generated in the child both persecutory internal objects, “an unconscious desire for vengeance at its worst”, and a fixation on the partial drives prevalent at the moment of relational dereliction, “in an attempt to maintain at all costs the axis of lost relationships” (pp. 33-8). The author stresses the fact that the logic of vengeance that he attributes to the pervert “lies not so much in the aim to do to another what has been done to you as to reestablish in violence and destruction a link which is indispensable to psychical life” (p. 277). And because sexual expression can be seen to have been more important than messages as such, for the pervert image is more prevalent than speech, and affect or sensation more important than verbal expression (p. 66).
Nor are Freud