Chapter 13. Infantile Perverse Sexuality

Having traversed the “good” and the “naughty” in regard to infantile sexuality, we now come to the area that psycho-analysis knows most about, again because the transference tends naturally to be preoccupied with its endless writhings. As explained, adult sexuality tends automatically to be excluded from the analytic material since it is simply not involved in the transference, while with adult patients the “good” and “naughty” infantile aspects induce so little guilt or other disturbance as to be only touched-on in passing. It is from the small children that our information about infantile polymorphism comes, mainly early in analysis when all the attempts at seduction of the analyst are run through before the transference rhythm really settles down and work commences.

But as perverse sexuality is involved in every aspect of psychopathology, our analytic nets are for ever dredging up references to it. Again we must remember that we are investigating and classifying states of mind, not behaviour, and our point of reference is the “primal scene”, as described by Freud and augmented by Melanie Klein. We must now make an additional augmentation. A sixth figure enters upon the scene: the “outsider”, the stranger to the family, the enemy of parental creativity, of familial harmony—of love; the evil one, the cynic, the spoiler, the carrier of the mark of Cain.

For personality development to be able to proceed, the primal splitting-and-idealisation described by Melanie Klein must take place, in self and object alike. Upon its accomplishment the primal categories of good and bad depend. Survival of the infant is inconceivable without it, except by the most extreme parasitism equivalent to an amentia. But there are clearly great variations in the quality of the primal splitting-and-idealisation in respect of attributes that might be termed rigidity vs. fluidity, or envisaged as the width of the split, the completeness of it, the sharpness of the cleavage, etc. At any rate what