Psychoanalysis’s Perversions: Witches, Bitches, and Sluts

Considered one of the three main structures of psychoanalytic psychopathology, perversion is quite an extensive category that is often based on behavior that is supposedly abnormal: nonhegemonic sexual practices and antisocial offenses or uncontrollable impulses. The epistemological and political controversy involved in the use of this term raises several questions, one of which is the moral reach of this notion coined by 19th-century psychiatry and passed on to mainstream psychoanalysis. This article aims to tackle the role sexuality naturalization plays in the psychoanalytic theorization of perversions, but also the extensiveness of this category. To address these questions, the author considers some current definitions of perversions in psychoanalytic psychopathology, to try to question some of their theoretical assumptions. When confronting these controversial definitions with Freud’s multilayered considerations about perversions, the author finds that it appears that Freud did not so much take up the category as he subverted it. Hence, in light of gender and sexuality deconstruction, and following Foucault’s injunction to “bodies and pleasures,” the author tries to show how psychoanalysis should remain perverse, in order to perpetuate Freud’s subversive approach to perversions.