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Following Kris's suggestion that 'the study of specific activities represents an important subject for future analytic investigation', Khan presents his conclusions regarding a specific activity which involves the body ego and expresses a dissociated intrapsychic state in the patient.
This specific activity is polymorph-perverse and is experienced autoerotically and/or with another object. It is the result of ego damage stemming from a particular kind of pathogenic mothering experience. In this group of patients all the mothers are considered to have been adequate for their infants. Their defect becomes apparent when the patient reaches the toddler stage. At this point the maternal inability to withdraw cathexis from the child's body makes it impossible for the child to react overtly with aggression or to experience psychically loss or separateness. Instead, the child develops a dissociation which is manifested clinically as polymorph-perverse sexual activity.
Polymorph-perverse body experiences are regarded by Khan 'as a regressive attempt at the discharge of these affects and a mode of empathy in the service of new perception in order to sort out the confused images, memories, and affects'.
The polymorph-perverse behavior observed in these cases is distinguished from