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Given that the thinking of most psychoanalysts about sexual perversion tends to start with Freud's (1905) “Three Essays” (with perhaps an obligatory nod to Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis), it is salutary to be reminded by Vernon Rosario that the topic has a much longer history than this. In his engaging study of the development of the erotic imagination, principally in France, from about the mid-18th century to the early 20th, the author also makes it clear that “perversity” and the very notion of sexual deviance are constructs rather than givens, constructs that are progressively shaped by changing sociopolitical and cultural forces, and that in turn influence the ways in which individuals and writers conceptualize and narrate lives. Rosario draws on his training in both medicine and literature to present the more specific thesis that “all eroticism in the modern Euro-American context is perverse because of the way sexual behavior and fantasy were theorized by physicians since the eighteenth century” (pp. 4-5). By this he actually means that the very notion of the erotic, and its terminology, result from the medicalization of discourse about sexual behavior that he traces initially to the period of increasingly secularized thinking leading up to the French Revolution.
Such ideas are not entirely new. Among their more obvious precursors is Michel Foucault's (1978) never completed The History of Sexuality, which argues that anxiety about sin, as formalized through the practice of confession, became transformed from the 17th century onwards into an increasingly “scientific” discourse about sex, but always in the service of social control. Rosario is able to illustrate his hypotheses in abundant and often entertaining detail, although he limits his discussion almost entirely to the French experience on the grounds that France was traditionally viewed as a “pernicious source of erotic literature” and of exotic