Writing from a European background, Sergio Benvenuto revives the analytic conversation about how sexual perversion can be understood, how that understanding impacts our view of sexuality, and whether, and if so how, sexual perversion can be cured. This book takes up the thorny issues of sexuality and ethics as they relate to the diagnosis, treatment and psychoanalytic understanding of perversions. Comprehensiveness and philosophically sophisticated thought are significant features in Benvenuto’s exposition. He begins by giving a brief history of the evolution of understandings of sexual behavior from religious and ethical condemnation of sexuality not directed to reproduction, to medicalization of that behavior, and subsequent psychoanalytic understandings of perversion.
He uses Aristotle’s four causes to reason out a definition of perversion. He asserts that the pervert requires ethical rules to enjoy the pleasure of breaking them. Masochism and sadism are his exemplars of perversion: the sadist requires the rule, “Do not punish innocents, precisely to ‘punish’ innocents because, as we shall see, this is the bottom line of his pleasure. The very law is perverted by the masochist: he enjoys being punished for a fault he himself pretends to have done.”
This definition is illuminating for these perversions, but it excludes such modern-day perversions as exclusively preferring pornography to sex with a person, or exclusively preferring sex with a doll to sex with a person. Since the author does not consider these as perversions, he can and does define perversion exclusively as enjoyment of the pain or absence of enjoyment in the other person in the sexual encounter. He contrasts neurosis which is ego-dystonic, psychosis which is socio-dystonic, and perversion which is hetero-dystonic. By this he means that in neurosis, the neurotic suffers; in psychosis consensual reality breaks down, and in perversion the sexual partner suffers.
The idea that the sexual partner suffers contrasts with the notion that the sexual partner is unimportant to the pervert as the fetishist elevates the body part or the accessory above the other person as the source of pleasure. For Benvenuto it is necessary that the other person be humiliated, feel pain or disgust in order for the pervert to feel pleasure. This accords with the dynamics of voyeurism and exhibitionism as well as sadism and masochism. Though he does not go that far, Benvenuto’s reasoning leads to classifying all perversions as sadistic in that they all require unpleasure in another person to be satisfying to the pervert.
Benvenuto follows Lacan in distinguishing the other, as a person, from the Other as an image of a person. The other exists in her own reality, the Other exists in the psyche of the pervert himself. I believe this is a clinically valuable distinction that could allow understanding the pervert as enacting revenge on a childhood figure who hurt, humiliated, and/or disgusted the person who became a pervert.
Does this work in the clinical situation? The examples given of men with perversions all ended with either the original perversion in place or with a similar substitute. Examples from Robert Stoller, Jean André, and others end in stalemate, or substitute symptoms. He notes it is necessary for the pervert to seduce the analyst into laying down a law which the pervert can then break.
In his own practice, Benvenuto treats a man for years who is diagnosed as a masochist because he marries a woman he considers beneath him because he imagines she wants that and agrees to a church wedding because he believes she wants that. His masochism becomes less important to him when he has a daughter. In a final scene, he asks his analyst to tell him he is finished with the analysis. When Benvenuto refuses to tell him that, the patient confesses he has a small penis and his neurosis is cured by this confession.
The case description is elegant. The mixture of neurosis and perversion in this case seems to show that neurosis is curable by analysis, it does not show what perversion is. The patient was suffering with a conscious secret and was relieved by unburdening himself of the secrecy. He did not claim his kind of sex was superior to sexual intercourse; he, in fact, hated his symptom. In both his suffering and his secrecy, he was the opposite of the pervert who enjoys and boasts of breaking the rules.
His examples of sadism come from history, Nazism, Hannah Arendt, and Stanley Milgram. All involve pain, but we cannot know whether the pain inflicted on the victim is the end in itself or is inflicted in order to feel powerful. Particularly in the Milgram experiment where subjects were told they were administering electric shock as punishment for wrong answers on a test, there was no reason to think they were enjoying the pain in a sexual way. They could have seen the experiment as one in which their willingness to be compliant was being tested. It is notable there was not even one example of the analytic treatment of a sadist.
And then there is the woman question. After waving off Estela Welldon’s examples of female sadists who harmed and, in some cases, even killed their own babies, Benvenuto argues that Helena Deutsch showed that masochism is normal for women. Does this mean female masochism is to be encouraged rather than treated? Benvenuto cites a case of a woman who was “masculine” in that she supported her family while her husband stayed home to take care of their children. Her treatment was presumably for frigidity. She could not reach orgasm unless it was by having her clitoris touched. Her husband’s revelation that he had been having an affair with a younger woman allowed her to enjoy vaginal orgasm. The narrative continues with the idea that this was female masochism and allowed her to really enjoy being penetrated.
There is no exploration of her fantasies. Was she enjoying sex with the younger woman through her husband, was she competing with the younger woman for the patient’s husband’s sexual attentions? Was she swallowing him up? Swaddling him in her vagina? Without investigation of such options, analysis becomes a kind of cut and paste operation where everything proves the theory and nothing new is ever found. This is not Benvenuto’s fault alone, much of the analytic literature uses case material to “prove” theory rather than using it to expand or refine theory. But it is a major flaw in the book.
In sum, if you are coming at the idea of perversion from an ego psychological, self-psychological, or relational point of view, this book gives you reason to rethink your assumptions. But if you are looking for clinical applications, look elsewhere. I am grateful for having had the chance to read it for the intellectual stimulation. I suggest that anyone interested in perversion also read The Age of Perversion by Danielle Knafo and Estela Welldon’s Sex Now Talk
Later on the subject to get a more contemporary and more clinical view of this important, enigmatic, and often clinically difficult problem.