The traditional psychoanalytical definition of perversion stresses deviant behaviour, including such categories as transvestism, fetishism, sexual sado-masochism, exhibitionism, voyeurism, paedophilia, and bestiality. However, as Freud noted, there are polymorphous perverse elements in everyone's sexual fantasies and behaviours, and the line between normality and abnormality is difficult to draw. In this book prominent psychoanalysts present the latest psychoanalytic perpectives on the perverse, expanding the definition to behaviours that are not overtly sexual and at the same time defining perversion more specifically.
Perversion - its ubiquity in infantile life and its persistence in the psychical and sexual lives of some adults - was a central element of Freud's lifelong work. The problem of perversion has since been revisited by many psychoanalytic schools with the result that Freud's original view of perversion has been replaced by numerous - often contradictory - perspectives on its aetiology, development and treatment. The concept of perversion has also been significant for the disciplines of cultural studies and gender and queer theory, which have explored the creative and dissident powers of perversion, while expressing a suspicion of its operation as a pathological category. This bi-partite collection offers a series of perspectives on perversion by a range of psychoanalytic practitioners and theorists (edited by Dany Nobus), and a selection of papers by scholars who work with, or critique, psychoanalytic theories of perversion (edited by Lisa Downing). It stages a serious dialogue between psychoanalysis and its commentators on the controversial issue of non-normative sexuality.
Understanding Perversion in Clinical Practice is a volume in the eagerly anticipated clinical practice monograph series from the Society of Analytical Psychology. Aimed primarily at trainees on the psychotherapy and psychodynamic counselling courses, those compact editions will be invaluable to all who wish to learn the basics of major psychoanalytic theories from an integrated viewpoint. The authors are Jungian analysts trained at the SAP, highly experienced in both theory and practice. Perversion is a concept that defies simplistic classification. This monograph provides a comprehensive study of the nature of perversion and the therapeutic relationship needed for treatment. Case studies are used throughout to illustrate aspects of perversion and notable psychoanalytic theories are detailed for greater understanding of what perversion is and how it can be treated. Female perversion is explored in a separate chapter as the symptoms and underlying reasons are quite different from those in male perversion.This is a helpful and succinct exploration of perversion in its numerous manifestations that provides a firm foundation in the subject.
In this important new book, Dr. Otto F. Kernberg, one of the world's foremost psychoanalysts, explores the role of aggression in severe personality disorders and in normal and perverse sexuality, integrating new developments in psychoanalytic theory with findings from clinical work with severely regressed patients. The book also integrates Dr. Kernberg's recent studies of the descriptive, structural, and psychodynamic features of problems stemming from pathological aggression with the vicissitudes of their psychoanalytic treatment. Finally, Dr. Kernberg demonstrates the importance of differential diagnosis for effective psychoanalytically inspired treatment of these disorders, providing a rich variety of clinical illustrations. The book begins by relating the dual-drive theory of libido and aggression to contemporary developments in affect theory. Dr. Kernberg then applies this general theory of affects to aggression, which in its pathological form centers on the affect of hatred. He analyzes sado-masochistic, hysterical-hysteroid, and narcissistic-antisocial spectrums of personality disorders, emphasizing how aggression is structured in each group. Dr. Kernberg next describes and updates the theoretical frame underlying his approach to the treatment of these disorders, outlines their clinical manifestations, and illustrates their diagnosis and treatment, ranging from standard psychoanalysis with infantile personalities, to psychoanalytic psychotherapy with borderline personalities, to the psychotherapeutic approach to the treatment of psychosis and hospital milieu treatment in the management of highly regressed patients. In the final section, Dr. Kernberg links the findings from psychoanalytic approaches to personality disorders with those from the psychoanalytic study of sexual perversions.
'Perversion is a challenge for theory and psychoanalytic practice that Juan Pablo Jimenez and Rodolfo Moguillansky, American psychoanalysts known for the originality of their contributions, have managed successfully. In this book they offer us vivid and detailed clinical material of patients of analysis who presented various kinds of perversions, which they accompany by a comprehensive and accurate review of major psychoanalytic contributions on the subject, and their own contributions to it.' The reader will find not only scholarship, but also he will find himself trapped in a thriller where the analyst is continually asked to leave his role as analyst to enter a game that fascinates and rejects. In a masterful way the authors describe their own internal vicissitudes in the treatment of these patients, the counter-transferential difficulties and how perversion becomes a source of inevitable collusions in the mind of the analyst.
From long before the Trojan War to the ethnic cleansings of our own century, people have often used their potential to treat other human beings as things. It is this treatment of another person as a thing rather than as a human being that the eminent psychoanalyst, Dr. Sheldon Bach, sees as a perversion of object relationships and that forms the background of this powerful book. Perversion is a lack of capacity for whole object love, and while this includes the sexual perversions it also includes certain character perversions, character disorders and psychotic conditions. Dr. Bach's clinical work has led him to conclude that sexual perversions are generally inconsistent with whole object love. Therapeutic experience suggests that the pathways to object love may be strewn with outgrown and discarded sexual perversions. But whether a sexual perversion per se exists or not, the issue of how it happens that one person can degrade another to the status of a thing is an issue of importance not only for the psychoanalysis of character but for our larger understanding of human nature as well. Perversions are attempts to simplistically resolve or defend against some of the central paradoxes of human existence. How is it possible for us to be born of someone's flesh yet be separate from them, or to live in one's own experience yet observe oneself from the outside? How are we able to deal with feelings of being both male and female, child and adult, or to negotiate between the worlds of internal and external stimulation? People with perversions have special difficulty in dealing with the ambiguity of human relationships. They have not developed the transitional psychic space that would allow them to contain paradox, making it difficult for them to recognize the reality and legitimacy of multiple points of view. Thus they tend to think in either/or dichotomies, to search for dominant/submissive relationships and to perceive the world from idiosyncratically subjective or coldly objective perspectives. In this
'Perversion is a challenge for theory and psychoanalytic practice that Juan Pablo Jimenez and Rodolfo Moguillansky, American psychoanalysts known for the originality of their contributions, have managed successfully. In this book they offer us vivid and detailed clinical material of patients of analysis who presented various kinds of perversions, w
Theoretical understanding of perversion is neglected in analytical psychology, and narrowly developed in psychoanalysis, where it traditionally refers to sexual perversion. Etymological exploration of the word "perversion", including its use in religious, moral, sociological and legal contexts, reveals a wider meaning than that adopted in psychoanalysis. The aim of the author is to revise the psychoanalytic model through the introduction of Jungian concepts that extend the understanding of perversion beyond the bounds of sexuality to a more general relational context. By describing the development of psychoanalytic thinking on perversion in detail, the author is able to highlight the central differences between the Freudian and Jungian interpretive traditions and to explain why Jungian ideas on perversion have remained underdeveloped, leading to the absence of a unique or available Jungian contribution to the theory of perversion.
Lacan's psychoanalytic take on what makes a pervert perverse is not the fact of habitually engaging in specific "abnormal" or transgressive sexual acts, but of occupying a particular structural position in relation to the Other. Perversion is one of Lacan's three main ontological diagnostic structures, structures that indicate fundamentally different ways of solving the problems of alienation, separation from the primary caregiver, and castration, or having limits set by the law on one's jouissance. The perverse subject has undergone alienation but disavowed castration, suffering from excessive jouissance and a core belief that the law and social norms are fraudulent at worst and weak at best. In Perversion, Stephanie Swales provides a close reading (a qualitative hermeneutic reading) of what Lacan said about perversion and its substructures (i.e., fetishism, voyeurism, exhibitionism, sadism, and masochism). Lacanian theory is carefully explained in accessible language, and perversion is elucidated in terms of its etiology, characteristics, symptoms, and fundamental fantasy. Referring to sex offenders as a sample, she offers clinicians a guide to making differential diagnoses between psychotic, neurotic, and perverse patients, and provides a treatment model for working with perversion versus neurosis. Two detailed qualitative clinical case studies are presented—one of a neurotic sex offender and the other of a perverse sex offender—highlighting crucial differences in the transference relation and subsequent treatment recommendations for both forensic and private practice contexts. Perversion offers a fresh psychoanalytic approach to the subject and will be of great interest to scholars and clinicians in the fields of psychoanalysis, psychology, forensic science, cultural studies, and philosophy.
