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Stephanie S. Swales's book Perversion: A Lacanian Psychoanalytic Approach to the Subject, published by Routledge in 2012, is a remarkable book that introduces the reader to a domain that is often difficult to understand and frequently beset with an array of moral judgments. Swales, a devotee of Bruce Fink, accomplishes an astonishing task not only of providing a clear picture of Lacan's perverse structure but also of being able to differentiate clearly between perverse, hysterical, obsessive, and psychotic structures. Perversion is not necessarily linked in Lacan's theory with perverse behaviors or acts, but is defined like neurosis and psychosis as a clinical structure, evolving out of the oedipal problematic. The key element that distinguishes the perverse structure from the neurotic structure is that the pervert remains attached to being the mother's “play thing,” becoming the instrument of her excessive jouissance, which finds no limit in the embodiment of a paternal structure. However, unlike the psychotic, who has no awareness of a Law or a Third structure, the pervert knows about the Law but does not want to know about it at the same time. He invents his own laws and abides by them, or as Lacan would say, he creates his own version of the father, that is, his “pere-version.” Swales's knowledge of the subject matter is impressive, as she cites both French and English/American authors. Although the typical English-speaking reader might, by now, be quite familiar with Bruce Fink's (1997) A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis, and his Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Technique (Fink, 2007), or Paul Verhaege's (2004) On Being Normal and Other Disorders, s/he may not be as acquainted with the multiple writings by Jacques Alain Miller or Serge Andre, or some of the still yet unpublished seminars by Jacques Lacan, in which he develops his major tenets about the perverse structure.
Not unlike other introductory books into the theory of Jacques Lacan, Swales