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The topic of the perversions has been a gift to psychoanalytic writing! Generations of analysts have imagined ongoing dialogue with Freud and his followers; they have formulated extraordinarily interesting, innovative, and imaginative theories of perversion, and theories that to this day keep generating new refinements. My sense is that, in the last few decades, analysts’ experiences of transferences and counter-transferences, clinical blind alleys, and failed and foiled treatments have generated
richer and deeper formulations. Simultaneously, political and social developments around sexuality, (e.g., removing homosexuality from the DSM list of “paraphilias,” and not labeling it as a mental disorder) have enhanced an awareness of both the role of analysts’ own political and social biases, and of the limits of our understanding and abilities to treat.
Accordingly, in terms of encompassing what is known and what is not known, I rate Benvenuto’s What are Perversions? as good as it gets in recent psychoanalytic writing on perversions. The author manages to deal with the unfolding history and array of psychoanalytic formulations, to propose some of his own useful elaborations, and, at the same time, conveys some awareness of the incompleteness of our understanding.
At the outset, he makes an attempt to explain and exemplify why he persists in using “perversion,” and provides a brief exploration of the history of efforts to evade and offer improvements of the term. (He opts to use the term “pervert,” which several authors eschew). Attempts to use other terms, such as “paraphilias,” or “neo-sexualities,” do not remove the complications— clinical, social, theoretical and ethical—inherent in the term. He also addresses the problem of “the list” of “the perversions.” The complications include finding an agreed upon definition for the term “perversion,” as well as considering who gets to define that list. The “list” has traditionally included: fetishism, voyeurism, masochism,