Devereux gives us an important assist when he points out that foreplay (with its use of perversion mechanisms) serves to increase tension and to heighten one’s involvement with a partner, while perversion proper aims to release tension and ignores one’s partner’s individuality. A review of Devereux’s position says that “a sexual relationship in which the behavior is normal but the object relationship defective is essentially perverted. If this definition is taken to encompass the vast majority of human sexual relations and to place them in the category of perverted relations, Devereux maintained, then so be it. It may be regrettable, he insists, but ‘only an infinitesimal fraction of mankind is capable of behaving and experiencing even occasionally in a mature manner befitting genital characters’ ” (14).
The term “perversion,” I believe, is necessary—notwithstanding its traditional pejorative meaning and dictionary definition—for certain character disorders in which the dynamics of hostility force one to aberrant sexual acts. But it is logically Rawed and clinically inept to say that, regardless of the degree to which a mechanism is used, the person using the mechanism sufiers a character disorder or that those whose practices are decidedly not to our (the definers’) taste are perverse, even without a shred of the mechanism. Perhaps we can think of the perversion mechanism (like all neurotic mechanisms) as analogous to physiological mechanisms such as fever. Degree is important; the quality and amount of other signs and symptoms accompanying the fever are important, as are duration, clinical course, variations in etiology, or success and failure of the mechanism in restoring homeostasis. But the mechanism alone tells us very little about the total state of the organism.
We cannot understand human sexuality (how tempting it is to say “normal human sexuality”) if we do not understand the perversion mechanism. Perhaps what heat does for the body the perversion mechanism does for the psyche in human life.
The old nonquestion: Are repression, displacement, symbolization, inhibition, and so forth normal or abnormal? By now, we should know that they are mechanisms, not judgments. We probably do not need the word “normal” in scientific discourse; it serves only for judgmental communications.
Aggression
Grand discussions of aggression are in vogue, and great, tumid thinkers are surfacing to bring us illumination. Territoriality, Destrudo, original sin, animal inheritance, a midbrain not quite connected to the cortex, capitalism, class warfare, twisted molecules, male chauvinism: each supposedly explains man’s viciousness. Yet we might do worse than return to the analytic study of individual cases for clues as to how aggression (activity) is converted into hostility (hatred and violence).
The study of the perversion mechanism and the perversions may help.
Chapter 7
Perversion:
Risk versus Boredom
Now I wish to approach this issue of the essential relationship between hostility and perversion from a different perspective: to look at the function of conscious and —especially—unconscious risk-taking as a prime component of the sense of excitement and sexual pleasure in perversion, and to cross-check the thesis by looking at sexual boredom. As with hostility, risk is sometimes part of the manifest content of the perverse act—in the grossly sadistic or masochistic perversions—and sometimes only latent, as in the fetishisms. Risk is inherent in the dynamic of revenge. We have seen how one recapitulates in fantasy an original trauma or frustration, with a new outcome: triumph. Let us add now that this attempted reversal is hazardous; one might immerse oneself again in the trauma. For pleasure to be possible, this risk cannot be too great; the odds cannot be high that one will experience the same trauma again. Nonetheless, the perversion must simulate the original danger. That gives it excitement, and so long as one keeps control, which is easy if it is one’s own fantasy, then it is a foregone conclusion (even if disguised in the story) that the risk will be surmounted.
Let us not be puzzled by those perversions in which.
in reality, great risks are run. We must be sure which risk it is that we are talking about. The risk that one will again fully experience the early childhood trauma is the primary one that energizes perversion formation, and for some people that is more awful than risking one’s life or being arrested.
The Sexual Fantasy
Just as every human group has its myth, perhaps for every person there is the sexual fantasy (perversion?). In it is summarized one’s sexual life history—the development of his or her erotism and of masculinity and femininity. In the manifest content of the fantasy are imbedded clues to the traumas and frustrations inflicted on sexual desires in childhood by the outside world, the mechanisms created to assuage the resultant tension, and the character structure used to get satisfaction from one’s body and the outside world (one’s objects).* The analyst has the opportunity to study this sexual fantasy and uncover these origins. And the findings of the single analysis, I have suggested, may be confirmed en masse: by pornography. Pornography is the communicated sexual fantasy of a dynamically related group of people. Rarely, the fantasy may not take a cognitive form at all but may be manifested consciously only in the ritual used for masturbation (105, p. 826).
In the opposite of sexual excitement—sexual boredom
*“It must be understood that each individual, through the combined operation of his innate disposition and the influences brought to bear on him during his early years, has acquired a specific method of his own in his conduct of his erotic life—that is, in the preconditions to falling in love which he lays down, in the instincts he satisfies and the aims he sets himself in the course of it” (28, p. 09). This compaction may occur in other states, when defense mechanisms are built into a complicated structure, such as the neuroses and character disorders. For instance, Khan says (74, p. 434) in talking of those with schizoid personality, “One could almost say that their defence mechanisms carry ossified within them memories of actual experiences and traumata wnich the infantile ego had no other means at the time of registering psychically.” —we can find clues about excitement. Aside from heightened excitement that is the result of changed physiology (such as prolonged abstinence, puberty, or other causes of shifts in hormone levels and CNS function), it may be that heightened sexual excitement occurs whenever the circumstances approximate the sexual fantasy. Is this equation possible: increased excitement equals increased impact of (one’s own) perverse elements—that is, cruelty? Modest excitement (barring physiological shifts) would mean, then, fewer perverse elements, and minimal excitement or boredom would mean, then, few or no perverse elements touching consciousness (they being absent or inhibited). Yet, the key point is not whether the fantasied or experienced sexual act has the perverse elements present, but rather whether they are really present, that is, able to act.
By “really” I mean something that requires a few words. Take the use of pornography, with its inherent perverse elements. The pornography industry is built around the problem of protecting its consumers against boredom. Pornographic material has a short half-life;* exciting material quickly becomes boring (121, p. 28). The pseudoexplanation is “familiarity,” but that does little more than give it a name. It does not explain why familiarity, in most arenas of erotic behavior, reduces excitement; without understanding the dynamics or without having lived in the world, one might as well have expected familiarity to produce greater pleasure; it sometimes does with happy couples.