Perversion1

The question of what constitutes a perversion, and of what perversion constitutes, has been with us at least since Freud's early formulation of perversion as the negative of the neuroses in the Three Essays (Freud, 1905). The controversial concept, as Adrienne Harris indicated in her opening remarks, is a magnet for all manner of moral, ethical, and unconscious elements in the field. The congress theme of ‘convergence and divergence’ was fully satisfied in this panel, which aptly demonstrates that more than 100 years after Freud's paper, we are still not in accord as to what constitutes perversion.

Ruth Stein presented the first paper, a sophisticated examination that acknowledged and actively engaged this complex history. For Stein the hallmark of perversion is ‘false love’ based on a perverse pact that disavows reality in favor of illusion. It origins are often in an enmeshed alliance between child and parent that employs seductive specialness to cover an underlying corruption of privacy and mutual respect. Stein takes great care to avoid a reductionistic reading of perversion as a deviation from heterosexual genitality; indeed, such a devaluation of ‘fore pleasures’ could itself be a perverse disavowal of socio-cultural evolution. But she is interested in preserving Freud's notion of means—ends reversal, if we can free this idea of its concrete sexual trappings and view it relationally. The false pact is demonstrated in the declaration of a stated end that is then used as a means to another, disavowed and hidden end. As an example, Stein relates her experience of an online psychoanalytic discussion group in which one participant denigrated others out of an espoused concern for the poor state of psychoanalytic thinking, masking his true aim of degrading others to achieve a sense of superiority. Similarly, perverse patients present to analysis with the ostensible aim to grow and develop, when their real end is to mock, deceive, or degrade the analyst. The perverse p