You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Gerald Fogel — one of the editors — reminds us in his excellent introduction that most of the chapters of this timely book derive from papers presented
at a symposium sponsored by the Association for Psychoanalytic Medicine and Columbia Psychoanalytic Institute. Fogel's introduction by itself would be an excellent “review” of the book's contents and its courageous contribution to a better understanding of that “archetypal ‘other,’ the ‘pervert’,” and of “perversity and its necessary and ubiquitous role in human psychology.” The psychoanalytic reader will find in Fogel's “Plan of the Book” a simple and clear preview that, I believe, will not fail to whet his or her appetite for all the papers he introduces to us.
Some time ago, I read a book titled Sexualite et Savoir Medical dans le Moyen Age (Sexuality and Medical Knowledge in the Middle Ages). It is an interesting expose, among other things, of how magical the “science” of the time was. The medieval theory of “perversions” was a curious one: The woman's vagina contained seven chambers, geometrically distributed in space, three to the right, three to the left, and one in the middle. According to the location of the chamber occupied by the fetus the child would be born either homosexual or heterosexual, and, if formed in the middle chamber, androgynous. I want to emphasize that the medical establishment of the period seriously believed in a theory that, today, makes us smile at its naiveté. This theory made me think immediately of Foucault's statement that the “knowledge” of a given historical period is both determined and limited by the dominant “épistème” of the period —that is, the “epistemological frame” that provides the basic units of meaning with which a determined historical period constructs its theoretical understanding of the universe, of humans and their relationships to other humans, to nature, and of their place in that universe.
I am writing this review of Perversions and Near-Perversions in Clinical