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Patients feel humiliated when they feel small, dependent, and looked down on. They may defend themselves against such feelings by looking down on the analyst or by attempting to enlist the analyst to join them in looking down on someone else.
(Steiner, J., 2011, p.26).
What I seek to illustrate in this work is the precocious origin of perverse behaviour which, when observed in analyses with adults, is found to be already structured. As an example, I took the case of a child of five and a half with a significant level of violence, who, over several years, had experiences of humiliation by the father and, in a way, seduction by the mother. I believe it is important to highlight that we can never diagnose a child as perverse because they are still developing. What I aim to show with this clinical material is how situations of humiliation and exposure to adult sexuality, creating premature eroticization, are central to the development of patterns of behaviour that may become organised as a perverse structure in adult age. To this, we add the high level of aggression of the child as an aggravating factor. What I seek to demonstrate is how early psychoanalytic treatment helped this patient to organise himself differently, making him more capable of integrating these aspects of his personality.
I believe that this is revealing clinical material because the profound study of the development of primitive emotions taken up by many authors, together with what we see in our patients, serves as a basis for the understanding of what we find in current clinical work and the changes that are emerging in society. These changes become controversial when speaking of sexuality and gender identity.
In developing this work, I have only considered authors that find an echo in my clinical experience, although I recognise other contributions that speak of the subject.
Psychoanalytically, when it comes to sexual manifestations, perversion can be understood as a clini