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Samuel Johnson, when asked his opinion of a new manuscript, told its author: 'Your work, Sir, is both new and good. But what's new is not good and what's good is not new'. So it is in our field where the quest for the new rages unceasingly as authors and their epigones regularly proclaim their breakthrough discoveries. New 'paradigms' are announced while hard-won knowledge is jettisoned as obsolete. How refreshing then, to come upon work of true originality which nevertheless builds on a solid foundation of psychoanalytic knowledge. Chasseguet-Smirgel has written such a book, one which uses psychoanalytic understanding to investigate a wide range of human conditions.
Creativity And Perversion presents the author's view of perversion as an essential way in which the human psyche rebels against and seeks to evade reality. In what she calls the 'anal-sadistic universe' (p. 2) of perversion, the differences between the sexes and the generations are abolished as pregenitality is idealized. Perversion is a universal temptation, offering a way of avoiding the narcissistic injury suffered by the child when he realizes his genital incapacity to possess mother. The 'genital universe' is one in which Fathers possess Mothers and children have to wait to become adults before they can gratify their deepest longings. Differences exist and are defined by the 'double differences between the sexes and the generations'. The pervert seeks to erode these differences and all differences, and in so doing to avoid psychic suffering.
In her first lecture, Perversion and the Universal Law, Chasseguet-Smirgel draws on the writings of the Marquis de Sade to demonstrate how perversion aims at destroying the genital world of differences and replacing it with a new reality. The aim of the pervert is to undermine authority in the form of the Father and to substitute 'a world of sham and pretence' (p. 12) in which all things revert to chaos. This is the 'anal universe' in which 'all part