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The author reevaluates the concept of perversion in the context of a general theory of personality. Perversions can have a dissociated status within a neurotic personality organization, but they can also affect the whole personality in borderline patients, where sexual perversions are ego-syntonic. Constitutional conditions, as well as early trauma, result in oral and anal conflicts, leading to the prevalence of aggressive over libidinal strivings and preventing a normal oedipal triangulation. A lack of differentiation between self and object, as well as difficulties of separation from the primary object, creates the agoraphobic-claustrophobic dilemma of the perverse individual, who develops on the one hand an unusually strong longing for closeness and being one with the object, and, on the other hand, an avoidance of closeness because of annihilation and engulfment anxieties.
In consequence of annihilation anxiety, the perverse person turns his or her pregenital aggression against the object. However, this is followed by fears of abandonment and consequent exposure to death by starvation. Thus, he or she needs a relationship in order to escape the fear of loneliness; yet in this relationship, the perverse individual must avoid real intimacy in order not to be swallowed. Via sexualization of oral and anal partial objects, he or she tries to compromise, triumphantly reversing previously unconscious anxieties, resulting in a primitive perception of reality.
Lackinger differentiates between various forms of perversion: benign perversions (fetishism and transvestism), transgressive perversions (voyeurism, exhibitionism, and frottage), and malign perversions (malign sadism, malign pedophilia, and the perversions of the rapist and child abuser). The extent to which the sexual integrity of others is attacked correlates roughly with the extent to which aggression is built into the level of personality organization.
With two case vignettes, the author shows that these different