Freud’s version of the oedipal conflict is puzzling in several regards (143), one of which comes up now. He believed the natural line of development is that of the boy, who, in the unconscious of mankind and in societies’ hierarchies, allegedly starts from birth a heterosexual with superior genitals and status. If so, why are perversions more frequent and often fiercely bizarre in males? We may find a clue in the mystery itself.
Let us look at identification. Perhaps no other mental mechanism results in the development of such egosyn-tonic, unalterable character structure. Also, identification is possession: another person, or at least an aspect of another, becomes oneself. That is the last state to provoke one’s sense of mystery. (My body and those like mine are not mysterious; thus, for instance, is formed one of the bonds in some homosexuals for whom the mystery—that there is another sex—is too frightening to be borne.) The first object seized upon by the process of identification is one’s mother, a person whose psyche and body are like the little girl’s but so different from the boy’s. He must learn of these differences and in time accept them. Then, to become masculine, he must separate himself in the outside world from his mother’s female body and in his inside world from his own already formed primary identification with femaleness and femininity (61, 135). This great task is often not completed—and that, I most tentatively suggest, is the greatest promoter of perversion. (We shall look at this hypothesis at greater length in chapter 8.) In men, perversion may be at bottom a gender disorder (that is, a disorder in the development of masculinity and femininity) constructed out of a triad of hostility: rage at giving up one’s earliest bliss and identification with mother, fear of not succeeding in escaping out of her orbit, and a need for revenge for her putting one in this predicament.
It is no news that mystery is exciting, and most analysts are probably aware that it is an element in all perversion. How does it work?
1. In the first year or so of life the child begins to believe he is a member of one sex or the other.
2. Then the anatomical differences between the sexes are discovered; attitudes expressed within the family and in society inform the boy and girl differentially that this is a subject of keenest importance (24).
3. The desire to satisfy oneself as to the nature, especially the appearance, of these differences is great because of the implications of danger to one’s sense of maleness or femaleness inherent in them. The genitals are the only way anatomy communicates the crucial differences of childhood sex assignment. (Length of hair may communicate these differences, and to the extent it does, cutting it is seen as a castration threat. Breasts do also, though for different beings: adults.) But the need to explore so as to find out (that is, to end the fear that the sex differences exist or are dangerous) is, in our society, frustrated more in boys than in girls. To be more precise, both boys and girls may be told it is naughty to look at the genitals of the opposite sex or to show one's genitals thus. The messages are subtly different, however. The boy learns that no one is surprised that he does so; if he is to be considered masculine in our culture, he is expected to be a bad, cocky little sadist. The girl, on the other hand, learns to anticipate the boys’ trying and learns also that she is expected to resist. These attitudes, inculcated in each sex, are reflected in such automatisms as proper leg-crossing or the skirt-pulling “habit” of cultured women when men are around. So the desire to look and the promise that it will be worthwhile are heightened by the very behavior used to thwart it. The more hindrance, the greater the overvaluation and distortion. One becomes very curious.
4. At this stage, phallic importance due both to a physiological increase in penile and clitoral erotic sensation and to simultaneous oedipal desires and dangers makes this curiosity even more exciting and frustrating. From such fertile ground grows the fantasy of the female phallus, a child’s attempt at explaining mystery that only heightens it. ("In all perversions the dramatized or ritualized denial of castration is acted out through the regressive revival of the fantasy of the maternal or female phallus [i, p. 16]. . . . Castration anxiety and its phase specificity to the phallic phase play the central role in perversion” [1, p. 28].)
5. Chronic, intense frustration—an essence of mystery —with the built-in threats if one tries to gratify oneself, functions as a cumulative trauma. But to reduce the tension of the “instinctual” desire by sexual looking is risky. So the mystery increases—yet, thus far, no perversion because, thus far, no gratification. Perversion, as we have noted, is made up of both danger and gratification. The problem facing the child is how to avoid danger (punishment) and how to get pleasure (reward) which arises from three activities: decreasing frustration, successfully doing what is forbidden, and having one’s body erotically stimulated.
6. An inadequate but at least partial solution can be reached by the creation of a neurotic psychic structure (unstable when expressed as neurotic symptoms, more stable in character structure); “neuroses are, so to say, the negative of perversion” (24). Sort of. More likely, rather than being a different category of reaction from neurosis, perversion is an erotic neurosis. With this aphorism, Freud was noting that in neuroses sexually perverse fantasies are disguised, hidden in the neurotic symptoms, while perversions express these desires openly. But others have since shown this is not accurate;1 the dynamics of perversion and neurosis are really different only in that the first leads to conscious pleasure and the second to conscious distress.
Whether or not the solution goes in the direction of
neurotic symptomatology without accompanying clear-cut, subjective erotic pleasure depends, I think, on the exact nature of the subtle, complicated reward-punishment system each family, usually primarily mother, develops. In perversions—the erotic neuroses—the sense of mystery and danger is heightened because the child has been traumatized or overstimulated explicitly at the point of mystery: genitals or desires to investigate genitals. Fenichel suggests some of this when he says, “Individuals in whom castration anxiety is provoked very suddenly and intensely are candidates for later fetishism" (19, p. 342); he thus indicates, as had Freud, that perversion may result as a “cure” for anxiety provoked by the realization that one can lose one’s sex. (See also
1. 53-55* 57* 58; >37- chap. 19.)
7. I have said that perversion is made up of danger, with its painful affects, plus pleasure, some components of which are relief and erotic sensation. A piece of explanation is still missing, however. When one is anxious about the mystery and frustrated and angry in attempts to fathom and end it, what converts these painful affects to pleasure?
Somehow the danger must be undone. Fear cannot in itself yield pleasure, nor can rage. Something new must be added to release one’s body for erotic response. The psychophysiology of fear and rage must be shifted into new channels if excitement is to change its quality and its course from muscles and gut to genitals.
The end to the mystery (with its castration anxiety plus the more primitive fear of identity destruction) comes by the creation of the full-blown, conscious, perverse act (or fantasy of the act). In it the mystery is solved by such devices as the phallic woman, denial, splitting, avoidance, fetishization, idealization, sour grapes, phallic worship, theories of male superiority, and so forth—a wide selection of mental mechanisms and fantasies all of which serve to trumpet that there is no mystery. They do so either by denying the difference between the sexes or, in stressing one’s own superior equipment, by saying the difference is without threat. (Greenacre, for instance, following Freud, says the fetish “serves as a bridge which would both deny and affirm the sexual differences" [59, p. 150].) Thus, by believing in women with penises, one denies that there is a whole class of humans who are castrated; or, in turning one’s fascination to a fetish like a woman’s garment, one maintains in the symbolizing equation fetish = penis that the woman is not castrated; or in finding males the better sex in all affairs that matter, a man can say he does not care that women are penis-less since he—fortunately—is not female. But of course the mystery has not been solved; it still rests there, unconscious, ready. Each episode of sexual excitement entices the return to the surface of the questions and fantasies that are the mystery. The resultant anxiety can now be reduced only by the perverse act, which, however, in its performance or in its fantasied state raises again the questions in the mystery. And once again the mystery must be solved. No wonder perverse people can feel so hounded by their sexual needs.* The most stable solution possible, in the face of the real threats presented by parents and society and the new form that these dangers take when incorporated into the superego, is the perversion. And, fixed indissolubly in place by the experience of physical pleasure, it is all too stable, so often unalterable by life experience or treatment.
1
the essential difference between neurosis and perversion is only “that in neurosis the repressed fantasy breaks through to conscious expression only in the form of a symptom unwelcome to the ego typically accompanied by neurotic suffering, whereas in perversion the fantasy remains conscious, being welcome to the ego and pleasurable. The difference seems to be one of ego attitude and position or negative emotional sign, rather than a difference of content." If that is the only difference and especially since most of the fantasy is as repressed in perversion as in neurosis—only a fragment breaking through to form the conscious scenario of the perversion—ought we not to drop the artificial, theoretical dichotomy? All we would lose is Freud's clever phrase about neurosis and perversion being negatives. Earlier (43), Gillespie had distinguished neurosis from perversion because the latter was due to splitting, considered a more primitive mechanism. Since Kleinians emphasize that splitting is part of all people's development and since it is described as essential in all tne patients on whom they report, is it helpful to use splitting as a means of differentiating neurosis and perversion?
We ought not to cling to a clinical belief easily refuted by observation: it just is not true that the adult perversion is the persistence, unchanged, of a piece of infantile sexual behavior (94; 19 [for example, p. 358]; 46, p. 181), an idea Freud stated in 1905 but no longer accepted by igig. Glover takes a similar position: “I would suggest that it puts the problem of the deviations in a more satisfying perspective if we regard them as equivalents of symptom formations wnich, like symptom formations, can be ordered in a developmental series in accordance with the historical priority of libidinal and sadistic stages and the amount of aggression loosened by frustrations at each of these phases” (47, p. 156). Interestingly, this contradicts his position that
A last hopeless mutter: Of what practical importance is it whether perversions are classified as neuroses or as something different?