*That is understood when, in talking of how the victim becomes victor, I touched on the multiple identifications—some of being the masochist and some of being the sadist—that simultaneously are present at differing levels of consciousness in the perverse fantasy. Another example is Williams’ (154) demonstration of how splitting is used in what he calls sexual murders (by which he does not mean people who murder for genital lust but rather men who murder women, thus blurring for me the meaning of "sexual”).
of responsibility. When, so our theory says, we are attacked by these external dangers in infancy, we choose to protect our instinctual pleasures, disguise our real intentions, fool the people on the outside who are the source of the dangers, and distract ourselves so that we lose (repress) our knowledge of what happened to us and why we behave. Thus our theory of motivation mixes determinism and free will into a brew.
Complicating this objective (scientistic) view of the sources of psychic motivation is our subjective, omnipotent (narcissistic) belief that our behavior is not determined (our choices are not determined) but is almost always of our choosing; that is the message of the strict superego. In brief, then, whether consciously or unconsciously, the person believes he chooses his perversion; so he feels. And thus, though the objective observer might not agree, the perverse person is sure he himself has created, connived, pandered, disguised, manipulated: he considers his perversion his own masterly production. Analytic practice is based on the thesis that such insight can be reached—that the patient will come to realize that he believes he has willed his own perversion —if the analyst's technique is good enough.
In this regard, Winnicott’s concepts of the "true self’ and the “false self’ (155) are most helpful clinically and a necessary advance over “ego,” "id,” and “superego” in much of our discourse. But his concepts sink us deeper into the issue of free will and determinism, for the “true self’ is seen as that dependable part of ourselves that does not falsify our fundamental knowledge —it is our ultimate subjective conviction (omniscience) —and the “false self’ as an inner person opposed to dealing with the truth. The “true self,” then, is the conscience of the superego. As I have contrasted “perversion” and “variant,” in the former one’s true self knows its own evil, which does not exist in the latter.
Opponents of the psychoanalytic theory of perversion take an opposite, that is, amoral, position (the position is amoral, not the proponents). While they may disagree among themselves, they are bound in agreement, as we have seen, that aberrant sexual behavior is not the product of (moral, that is, superego) conflict.
Mystery and the Role of Hostility in Perversion
Let me add another factor that in our society is also a source of frustration, with potential for trauma in childhood: the mystification of the anatomy, functions, and pleasures of sexuality. With its punishments, its promise of adult marvels, its transmission of society’s sexual myths and preoccupations (too often by parents’ secretive, guilty excitements), this mystification may contribute to perversion, if too intense or bizarre. For it victimizes children, tantalizing them with hints of dangerous pleasures that, being mystery, forever demand but are beyond solution. For instance, the anatomical differences between the sexes may promote perversion —voyeurism—in societies that sexualize clothes and nudity. The pornography of nudes will be ubiquitous when a class—in our society, males—is unceasingly informed, openly and subliminally, from childhood on, that they may not look, but that if they could the vision would be astonishing.
Freud made it clear (24, 29, 30) that instinctual vicissitude is the result of hostility—of two sorts:* namely, that inflicted on us from the outside and that generated intrapsychically in reaction. Most analytic workers have looked more closely at intrapsychic dynamics of hostility when searching for the etiology of perversions, for that is the traditional analytic process of discovery. Hostility was found to be divided into that directed against oneself
*Of two sorts with which I agree; a third, which in its final form he called "death instinct," is too religious for my taste.
(guilt, punishment) and that directed outward (rage, revenge). Perversion was studied by analyzing the perverse.
Considering that the view only from inside the sexual neurotic, although of greatest importance, is not enough to tell the whole story of the origins of perversion, I have also been interested in the pressures, especially hostility, that were directed by parents onto their now perverse child. Understanding of etiology thus opens up; the perverse person cannot really see what his parents did to him, when they did it, or why. (Would not the study of etiology in all neuroses be improved in this way? Not a new suggestion, certainly, but one for which few theoreticians have shown much enthusiasm.)
From this perspective, which places hostility in the center, the perversion lies in the meaning of the act, wherein is hatred and a need to damage, not love, one’s partner. Of course, we are now in difficulty, for we risk finding that there is very little, including much of heterosexual behavior, that might not have a touch of the perverse. Freud implies as much in his description of the oedipal conflict and the pitfalls of libidinal development.
These propositions are most vigorously tested in the least perverse circumstances; the major perversions do not give them much of a challenge, for there the dynamics are too visible.
In order to illustrate these dynamics and to test arguments that arise in retaining the term “perversion,” we can return to and study more closely sexual looking,* one of the most normative sexual behaviors of our society. No analyst will disagree that frantic sexual looking, that is, voyeurism, is a perversion. But can one call the ubiquitous sexual looking of men in our society a perversion? Does that not ruin the meaning of the term?
An obvious fact starts us off. In societies where there
*1 prefer to use that term rather than ‘‘voyeurism,” which already clearly connotes perversion.
is unlimited nudity, no one is keenly interested in looking at the freely available anatomy. On the other hand, in a society such as ours in which certain body parts are proscribed, sexual curiosity is aroused about just those parts. The subtleties and shifts in degree and parts proscribed create fashions in dress, carriage, fantasy, and pornography. In our time and culture, looking is far more intricate and stylized for males (sadism is the mythic theme in masculinity) and being looked at is more so for females (and masochism is the theme here).
Our subject, then, is mystery, a quality so important to sexual excitement that the two are almost synonymous. Such mystery derives from childhood and the convoluted way our society obscures the discovery of the anatomical differences between the sexes. Our knowledge that anxiety is an essential element of mystery is confirmed, as Freud showed long ago, in oedipal development and in those of its anxieties that derive from the anatomical differences.
But children of each sex develop anxiety about the genital differences; why the lessened sense of mystery— and why less perversion—in females? To some extent this can be accounted for by the restrictions against boys freely investigating female bodies, these in turn based on and magnifying the ancient fear of female genitals and generativity. A phallus is dangerous but not mysterious; the womb’s danger comes from silence, secrecy, and growth in darkness—which is mystery. But behind these factors may be found issues which, arising in the first months of life, are still active years later, buried in the depths of one’s identity.