Toward a Classical-Relational Synthesis: Introduction to a Case of “Perversion”

Perversion is one of the most elusive of all the psychoanalytic categories. As Stephen Hartman (this issue) writes, “Perversion is a slippery topic” (p. 408). This may well reflect the condition itself, such as it is a condition. Neurosis, perversion's converse, lends itself to the ordering effects of psychoanalytic discourse, whether in its writing or its consulting rooms. But perversion eludes, attacks, deconstructs analysis itself, twisting and turning it at every opportunity. Is perversion a form of sexuality, a defense, a character disorder? Is it a behavior pattern, a relational style, an aesthetic, a way of life? Is it a diagnosis, a protest, a tool of sexual-political oppression or, at the same moment, of liberation?

It should not be surprising that the different analytic persuasions approach all of this uneasily and inconsistently. Even within the classical traditions there are varied and contending models: Freud specified the pervert's retreat from castration anxiety and its demand for giving up fantasy for reality; Kleinians emphasize her destructive subversion of the analytic discourse; analysts working in the British Independent tradition, notably Masud Khan (1979), drew the links between early object relational trauma and massive inner deadness and splits within the self; French analysts point to the flight from the Oedipal demand to place reality over fantasy and failures of representation. Trying to link these different views often involves torturous efforts at translation; they hardly seem to complement, or even correlate with one another.

Cultural critics, including feminist relationalists, like Dimen (2003) and Goldner (1991), have interrogated the category itself. Without abandoning the psychoanalytic interest in mental processes, they see the term “perversion” marking and enforcing the boundaries of normativity, rather than reflecting some essential psychic structure, of whatever kind. From this perspective, it is a social construction, marginaliz