Comment on the Paper By J. O. Wisdom

Professor Wisdom's paper is full of points which must be considered. To do any justice to a criticism of his ideas I should like to see a variety of comments from other readers rather than attempt here a thoroughgoing scrutiny of them. Doubtless there could be extremely fruitful debate covering a wide range of opinions.

If one begins, as Wisdom does, with a definition of perversion as ‘a preference for a sexual activity that lies outside heterosexual intercourse’, then all homosexuality is a perversion, which only in certain cases can be understood as a determination not to combine the opposites, and above all to do things differently from the internal parents. The perverse implication of this is the betrayal of the good internal parents. But this, in my view, sheds no light on the matter of perversions. For us analysts the heart of the matter is in the feelings. I think in order for us to avoid the psychiatric pitfall of classifying conditions according to their external characteristics we must above all consider the inside situation. To do this with sexuality I have been greatly helped by Meltzer's fundamental distinction between polymorphous and perverse sexuality, based on the underlying mental life, setting aside for these purposes the further fundamental distinction between infantile and adult sexual states of mind.

From an analytic viewpoint the question of what is perverse, depending, of course, on what we mean by the word, is surely to do with the unconscious motivation in its unconscious context. Put in terms of the psychology of internal ‘object’ relationships, to which Wisdom on the whole does not refer, I am personally concerned with the question of what the patient, in his inner life, is doing to the object, and to himself, and to the other members of his internal family. In this I can come to terms with part of what Wisdom writes on the subject. It would, however, be better if we could dispense with the term ‘perverse’, if we can get no further than th