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This book is certainly up to date. The chapters are versions of papers presented at a conference on what is one of the hottest topics in psychoanalysis right now. The conference was very well attended, and the book based on it seems likely to have the wide readership it deserves. Conference and book both extend the borders of the term perversion in a way that builds on a 1971 paper of Jacob Arlow called “Character Perversion.” In that paper, Arlow described some character traits that were based on unconscious fantasies of a perverse nature. He showed how the unrealistic character, the petty liar, the practical joker, and the petty swindler all deny defensively what they conceive to be the castration of women.
In an introductory essay, Fogel outlines the plan of the book. Starting with a section on perversions, it goes on to sections about perverse manifestations in clinical practice, one on perverse manifestations in women, couples and analysts, and one on perversions as seen in literature. As it happens, the sections are not so neat. Arnold Cooper's lead essay defines the perversions in terms of literary models. His paper might have been more appropriately placed in the last section of the book. But he does address all the major issues mentioned later, so that he gives a second overview. He says
I want to emphasize that the core trauma in many if not all perversions is the experience of terrifying passivity in relation to the preoedipal mother perceived as dangerously malignant, malicious, and all-powerful, arousing sensations of awe and the uncanny. The development of a perversion is a miscarried repair of this injury, basically through dehumanization of the body and the construction of three core fantasies designed to undo the intolerable sense of helpless passivity. (p. 23)
He goes on to describe these fantasies as (1) Mother is dead; (2) I am dead, and; (3) any pain she gives me is at my pleasure. Taking