As a first line of defense, children fantasy situations that reverse trauma and frustration (thus fairy tales,
*Also at work, perhaps, is a reinforcing (conditioned) quality laid down in contact with the CNS pleasure centers (113), adding to the desperate, driven quality of the search for pleasure in the perversions and addictions. This does not contradict the analytic explanation, which emphasizes anxiety reduction. The two coufd potentiate each other.
games with toys, movies, gratifying daydreams). In time, with modifications and disguises, they put into behavior, in real situations with people who do not consider themselves simply actors in their script, the action formerly only fantasied. Perverse people, however, deal with their partners as if the others were not real people but rather puppets to be manipulated on the stage where the perversion is played. In the perverse act, one endlessly relives the traumatic or frustrating situation that started the process, but now the outcome is marvelous, not awful, for not only does one escape the threat, but finally immense sensual gratification is attached to the consummation. The whole story, precisely constructed by each person to fit exactly his own painful experiences, lies hidden but available for study in the sexual fantasy of the perversion.
There are two hypotheses amenable to future testing, for which I do not yet have confirming data, that round out this part of the explanation. First, that the trauma or frustration of childhood was aimed precisely at the anatomical sexual apparatus and its functions or at one’s masculinity and femininity. If the target was other, nonsexual parts or functions of the body or psyche, the result should be one of the nonerotic neuroses (for example, the compulsive personality when control, especially excretory, is forced on the child too early, too hard, or too long).
The second hypothesis is that sexual excitement is most likely to be set off at the moment when adult reality resembles the childhood trauma or frustration. This implies that more anxiety is felt during the perverse sexual act than is present in less perverse sexuality. This anxiety —anticipation of danger—I believe is experienced as excitement, a word used not to describe voluptuous sensations so much as a rapid vibration between fear of trauma and hope of triumph.
The perversion (that is, the newly created fantasy) does more than solve the mystery, however. The central theme that permits this advance to pleasure is revenge.* It reverses the positions of the actors in the drama and so also reverses their affects. One moves from victim to victor, from passive object of others’ hostility and power to the director, ruler; one’s tormentors in turn will be one’s victims. With this mechanism, the child imagines himself parent, the impotent potent. One no longer fears the mystery, or conscience, or the outside world. The perversion is one more masterpiece of the human intellect.! Life can go on, the child can continue his development, a sense of worth and the hope for gratification are preserved, and triumph is converted in time
•“The sexuality of most male human beings contains an element of aggressiveness—a desire to subjugate” (24, p. 157). "The fetish . . . contains congealed anger, born of castration panic" (59, p. 162). When writing of sadism, though not of perversion in general, Fe-nichel (19, p. 354) says: "Anything that tends to increase tne subject's power or prestige can be used as a reassurance against anxieties. What might happen to the subject passively is done actively by him, in anticipation of attack, to others. . . . [Fenichel's italics] The idea ‘Before I can enjoy sexuality, I must convince myself that I am powerful’ is, to be sure, not yet identical with ‘I get sexual pleasure through torturing other persons'; however, it is tne starting point for a sadistic development. The 'threatening' type of exhibitionist, the braid cutter and tne man who shows pornographic pictures to his 'innocent' partner, enjoys the powerlessness of the partner because it means ‘I do not need to be afraid of him,’ thereby making possible the pleasure that would otherwise have been blocked by fear. Sadists of inis type, by threatening their objects, show that they are concerned with the idea that they themselves might be threatened."
Boss (7, p. 21) quotes Kunz (H. Kunz, “Zur Theorie der Perversion,” Monatsschr. f Psychiatre, 105:24, 1942): "The inclusion of destructive impulses in sexual activities cannot be regarded as specific only for sadism, it must also be typical for all other forms of perversions”; but Boss also correctly complains (p. 22) that "no explanation is offered as to how ‘destructive dismembering and deformation,’ ‘an action damaging to life' or ‘the most evident destruction of the erotic meaning of love* (von Gebsattel) can be the sexually exciting content of the perverted action.” That is what I am trying to answer: Where does tne erotic pleasure come from?
fAs with the other neuroses, it also serves evolutionary purposes in providing a mechanism whereby the species can survive and reproduce itself in the face of the trouble it (our cortical development) nas gotten us into in granting us civilization (cf. 24, p. 156). See also chapter 12.
(when erections and orgasm are possible) out of disaster, so long as ritual (eternal vigilance) is maintained and autonomous.
In the sexual excitement now available is subliminal awareness of the reward and punishment consequent to sexual desire. And so, when excited, one moves between the sense of danger and the expectation of escape from danger into sexual gratification. Risk was taken and surmounted. Orgasm then is not merely discharge or even ejaculation but a joyous, megalomanic burst of freedom from anxiety (analogous to the release of great laughter following a beautifully executed joke, where the build-up of hostile intent is suddenly fractured, with laughter the outcome [25]). The line between explosive triumph and impotence is a fine one, however. The wrong kind of risk-taking (that which threatens to reveal its origins) withers excitement. No wonder change in the ceremony can reduce sexual excitement.