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Dany Nobus and Lisa Downing's Perversion: Psychoanalytic Perspectives/Perspectives on Psychoanalysis constitutes an important and provocative contribution to the literature in psychoanalysis as well as the humanities. The first half of the book is devoted to psychoanalysts’ clinical and theoretical material, while the second half features scholars from the humanities considering the social and cultural repercussions of psychoanalytic rhetoric and their ideas on how to move forward. The two sections of the book are introduced by short essays from Nobus and Downing, respectively.
Nobus masterfully and humorously describes to the reader the polemic justifying a volume of collected essays like this one, beginning with a deceptively simple question:
Why is using a plumed feather for sexual purposes regarded as “healthy,” “normal,” and “erotic,” whereas employing a whole bird is unequivocally considered “sick,” “bizarre,” “abnormal,” “deviant,” and “pathological?” (P-3)
With this, Nobus sets the tone for the articles to come. In his introduction he confronts the shifting historical grounds out of which the concept of perversion as we know it today has arisen: its move from socio-religious, to medical, to sexual realms, preserving all the while its moral underpinnings, and the question of ethics, morality, and legality when conceptualizing perversion, and how these categories influence