Perversion: Erotic Form of Hatred or Exciting Avoidance of Reality?

I have been interested in exploring the relationship between play, perversion, and psychopathology (Jureidini, 1994, 2000).† It is not easy to establish a principled distinction between what is perverse and what is creative or playful. This essay, which in some ways is background to my paper “Pathological Play,” is an attempt to make that distinction and to determine what it is that characterizes perversion as pathological. It contains little clinical material, but I assume that readers will have ready access to perverse material from their own practice. Perversion has been characterized as “the negative of neurosis,” as sexual deviation, as hostile enactment of unconscious fantasy, and as disavowal of reality or truth. I will criticize each of the first three characterizations, and argue that only the last is plausible. I will begin with a discussion of the definition of perversion, and of Freud's use of the term, and distinction from “neurosis.” I will then examine which qualities of “sexual perversion” make it perverse rather than deviant, concluding that neither sexual content nor hostility are convincingly definitive of perversion, and that it is better to define it in terms of reality avoidance. I will conclude that perversion is best understood as a way of dealing with conflict, characterized by a state of narrowmindedness in which recognition of the real needs of some object (human or inanimate, part of self or other) is avoided, allowing it to be rendered a plaything, and ruthlessly commandeered for some pathological enactment.

It is only in the late 19th century that “perversion” was used specifically in relation to sexuality to describe “a disorder of sexual behavior in which satisfaction is sought through channels other than those of normal heterosexual intercourse” (Oxford English Dictionary, ). There is a much older sense of perversion, extending back to at least the