You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The author's previous works on gender identity and on the dynamics of perversions have led him to his present effort to formulate a theory of sexual excitement. Following his earlier ideas, he believes that the mental factors present in perversions contribute to sexual excitement in general, since there is a continuum from normal to perverse.
His theory, briefly stated, is that it is hostility, the desire to harm another person, that generates sexual excitement. The hostility is seen as an attempt to undo the childhood traumata and frustration that threatened the development of one's masculinity or femininity via castration anxiety. The factors that perversions and sexual excitement have in common, then, are hostility, mystery, risk, illusion, revenge, reversal of trauma (or frustration) to achieve triumph, safety, and dehumanization (fetishization). Excitement operates as a dialectic between the positive and negative outcome regarding pleasure/pain or danger/safety.
The corollary of this hypothesis is stated: it is only in the rare people who can contain sexual excitement and love within the same relationship that hostility and secrecy play an insignificant part. That so broad a generalization is supported by clinical data from the analysis of a single patient in the present volume must raise questions