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In her fascinating account of the history of perversion, and its historical incorporation within a Freudian psychoanalytic paradigm, Ross, a Jungian analyst and psychologist, attempts to broaden its meaning and application to non-sexual forms of perversion. She also explores reasons why perversion has, to date, been a relatively neglected area within Jungian analysis and redresses this with a formulation that incorporates a contemporary understanding of perverse states of mind. She has developed a new methodology, rooted in the biographical accounts of well-known individuals to illustrate the sense in which perversion can be understood as a fundamentally deceitful and impoverished mode of relating to others, and that it is not simply a mode of functioning confined to sexual attitudes and behaviour. Following on from her earlier research on Jungian contributions to understanding perversions, this short but informative book is a controversial but engaging attempt to challenge orthodoxies and to broaden understanding of deeply significant and problematic ways of relating. She manages to argue with passion and conviction for a relational account of perversion, taking it out of the constricted range of sexual deviance and understanding it as a form of deceit and stealing, a fundamental attack on the currency of intimacy that can manifest in a variety of activities, and shares features of other addictive and compulsive behaviours.
Initially I found this book difficult to engage with and the language obscure, discouraged from reading by the first sentence in the introductory chapter: ‘Theories of perversion have traditionally belonged within the Freudian interpretive tradition, which I refer to as psycho-analysis (with a hyphen), freeing psychoanalysis (without a hyphen) to denote the whole analytic field including analytical psychology’. This was an inauspicious start for me, and I found myself attempting translations in my mind to render the sentence personally meaningful