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John Buell, Democracy By Other Means, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995, 169 pp., $14.95. Richard Delgado (ed.), Critical Race Theory: The Cutting Edge, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995, 592 pp, $29.95. Joel Whitebook, Perversion and Utopia: A Study in Psychoanalysis and Critical Theory, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995, 350 pp, $17.50.Keywords:
Perversion
Utopia
Critical Theory
The three clinical structures—neuroses, psychoses, and perversions—should not be limited to being considered as mere clinical characteristics. Instead, they confront the human beings who are captured in them with existential questions and should not be mixed up. Nevertheless, they can interfere with each other. Under certain circumstances, perversion can have serious implications for a psychotic subject. One cannot always minimize these “importations” of perversion into the life of a psychotic subject as a “feature of perversion.” This observation on a clinical basis led us to reexamine how Freud approached and differentiated the two structures of psychosis and perversion.
Perversion
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The history of ideas about perversion is considered, along with an examination of whether the concept is clinically useful. Three cases of varying degrees of severity are presented, illustrating the clinical value of the concept in the analytic situation. All three cases are women, and the particular usefulness of the concept of perversion for women is noted. The place of aggression and the pleasure resulting from its expression are highlighted.
Perversion
Value (mathematics)
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Perversion
Psychic
Cruelty
Freudian slip
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The notion of transitory perversion was used fifty years ago about an adolescent in an article by R. Lebovici that was commented upon and discussed by J. Lacan in his seminar and in his Ecrits. The author shows how this notion got lost in the meandering discussions about adult perversion that arose afterwards. However, it is particularly useful now, when there is a tendency to prejudge a subject’s future on the basis of his childhood or adolescent behaviour. We can see that it attests to difficulties in making certain messages prevail over sexual expression in the proper sense, and is a prerequisite for sexual identification. Qualifying the perversion as « transitory » is enough to signify that it is not a perversions in the same sense as in the adult, though it nevertheless has much to teach us about adult perversion.
Perversion
Oedipus complex
Identification
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ABSTRACT. This paper argues that disavowal , the mechanism underlying perversion, is by its very nature self‐contradictory and cannot be fully accounted for by either of Freud's psychical topographies. It is suggested that successive theorists have failed to solve this problem adequately, but have tended to discuss perversion in terms more appropriate to either neurosis or psychosis. This paper proposes that perversion displays a radically unique style of defence; it is described how this differs from repression in particular. Finally it is shown how analysis of the rhetoric of perverse fantasy can clarify the nature of this unique defensive strategy.
Perversion
Neurosis
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Unlike the more obvious forms of sexual perversion, self-subjugation (sexual dependency) is described by the author as having neurotic affiliations; further, she considers it to be related to masochistic perversion and to be potentially universal in its incidence. With reference to an actual case history. Adler illustrates the influence exerted by this perversion on transference and counter-transference processes. It transpires that sexual self-subjugation is associated with severely restricted perception and an impoverishment of the faculties of signification and symbolization, frequently appearing as a form of concretism that only acknowledges external realities. Sexual dependency acts as a defence against separation anxieties and against acceptance of the fact of needing help from another person.
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Perversion
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Abstract This chapter shows how the pre-sexual history of the concept inheres in modern beliefs about sexual perversion, and with the objective of replacing the pathological concept with a political one. Perversion was (and remains) a concept bound up with insurrection. More generally, and in the light of that history, this chapter wants to recover perversion as not only a culturally central phenomenon, but a category from which two concepts emerge that are crucial for insurrectionary critique: the perverse dynamic and transgressive reinscription. It is the sexual sense of the word that predominates now and, before recovering the history of the concept, the chapter considers two important but opposed accounts of sexual perversion, those of Sigmund Freud and Michel Foucault respectively. Opposed as they are, both nevertheless identify perversion as culturally central.
Perversion
Transgressive
Phenomenon
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Abstract This paper aims to discuss perversion, its implications in the clinical setting, and some of the key concepts around it. First, the etymology of the words “perversion”, “structure”, and “organization” is analyzed. Next follows a discussion on the sexual organization of instincts – from the Unconscious to the Oedipus complex in Freud and Lacan – setting the ground for a disavowal-based theory of perversion. An instructive approach has been chosen so as better to organize the various points presented. Laender NR et al. Perversion – Struktur oder Organisation? Der Aufsatz diskutiert die Perversion, ihre Auswirkungen im klinischen Setting und einige Schlüsselkonzepte. Zuerst wird die Herkunft der Wörter Perversion, Struktur und Organisation analysiert. Dann folgt eine Diskussion über die Organisation der Sexualität bzw. der Instinkte – vom Unbewussten bis zum Ödipuskomplex bei Freud und Lacan – wodurch eine Theorie der Perversion auf der Basis von Ablehnung begründet wird. Ein instruktiver Zugang, bei dem die verschiedenen Punkte von Interesse gut strukturiert sind, wurde gewählt. Laender NR et al . Perversion – organización o estructura? Este trabajo intenta discutir la perversión, sus implicaciones en la clínica y algunos de los conceptos clave alrededor de la perversión. Primero, es analizada la etimología de las palabras Perversión, Estructura y Organización. Despúes sigue una discusión sobre la organización sexual de los instintos- desde lo Inconsciente hasta el complejo de Edipo en Freud y Lacan- planteando las bases para una teoría de la negación-desaprobación de la perversión. Para organizar mejor los varios aspectos presentados se escogió una aproximación instructiva.
Perversion
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In this paper, the author works with the awareness that perversion is a socially, historically and theologically loaded term, at the same time as it may be the latest frontier in psychoanalysis, both clinically, and in relation to contemporary art and culture which emphasize the perverse. Positioning itself against tendencies to deny the existence of a category of perversion or, inversely, to abuse it for the power that accrues from the act of diagnosing, she also points to other liabilities in the history of the treatment of this term, such as the narrowing down of perversion to the exclusively sexual domain, or, alternatively, the overextension of it to polymorphously erotic practices that enhance sexual excitement. The paradoxes of perversion and the difficulties of distinguishing the perverse from the non‐perverse are addressed. The case is also made that, in order to understand perversion, one must unlink it from the narrow notion of sexual practice and see what is involved on a deeper level an approach initiated when psychoanalysis turned to perversion as a defense against psychotic anxieties, and began considering the necessary place of perversion in the transference countertransference. Two features common to both sexual and non‐sexual perverse relations are the seductive and bribing aspects of perversion, and its means‐ends reversal. Perversion is a haven for the disguising of hatred and suspicion as excitement and (false) love. Displaced child and beating father, entitled child and seductive mother, are both prototypes of psychoanalytic refiection on parents who excite, deceive and corrupt their children and establish perverse pacts with them. The notion of the perverse pact is foregrounded in Alice's analysis, where first the resurrection and then the dismantling of such a pact were effected through various analytic means.
Perversion
Hatred
Countertransference
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