Sexual boredom is, I believe, especially the result of the loss of sense of risk. So, even if the other proper elements are present in the fantasy/pornography, it does not work well unless one can still be just a bit fearful,
*This is also true for other sexual stimuli, as is known by many married couples, rapists, habitual masturbators, shoe fetishists, and most other humans capable of sexual excitement: variety of details within constancy of theme keeps one potent while protecting one from the rigors of intimacy.
uncertain of a successful outcome. (The same dynamic of risk applies elsewhere. I have mentioned jokes. And it is probably also at the bottom of art appreciation and the rapid dating of art styles; committed art critics, like connoisseurs of pornography, are honestly and deeply unable to respond to a different set of expressed dynamics. And within their preferred genre, they need a constant flow of works at the perimeter, where one can imagine himself at risk for experiencing something new. Their natural enemy, the artist, has, nonetheless, a similar dynamic, a need for mystery and simulated risk. At the moment, I would define art—like sexual excitement—as the search for [controlled, managed] ambiguity.)
I am referring here to two sorts of risk. The first, not usually central to perversion, is the heightened excitement some people get in performing a sexual act where they might be caught (breaking a custom, taboo, or statute); this is conscious risk-taking and is used to add sauce to a dish.* The other risk, more important to our discussion, is concerned with unconscious deposits of the oedi-pal situation, such as the mystery of the anatomical difference of the sexes. The unfinished oedipal conflict in the adult places the possibility of failure into the center of his sexual act. Sexual excitement (other than its purely physical sensations) is, then, the product of an oscillation between the possibility of failure (small) and the anticipation of triumph (larger). The perversion is the complicated path that threads its way through the dangers to triumphant sexual gratification.
McDougall (103, p. 378) has already noted some of this:
In every instance the plot [of the perversion] is the same:
castration does not hurt and in fact is the very condition
of erotic arousal and pleasure. . . . There is always a
•Not always; sometimes it can be a major element in the sexual act, as in sadomasochistic sexual rituals or in those persons who hang or anesthetize themselves to produce orgasm.
spectator to this stage play—a role which the individual will frequently play himself as he watches in the mirror the production of his special sexual scene. [Think of the relationship of this to pornography, wherein the reader or watcher is the director, with the portrayed participants as the traumatized child and his traumatizing parents.— R.J.S.] There is an important reversal of roles here; the child, once victim of castration anxiety, is now the agent of it, the dealer in castration . . . ; the excited child, once the helpless spectator of the parents' relationship or victim of unusual stimulation which could not be dealt with, is now the controller and producer of excitement, whether his own or his partner's. In fact, many perverts are uniquely interested in manipulating the other person's sexual response [as the adults once did theirs; cf. chap. 5].
Since so much of development and especially of differentiation is risk, especially in infancy, I seem to have made my task too easy, on claiming that risk is at the core of perversion; it is at the core of so much of character structure and symptomatology—only we call it anxiety. But what I mean here is something more precise. First, we know that risk is not quite the same as anxiety. Risk implies that one has stepped beyond mere experience of fear or anticipation of danger and is computing the chances of success versus failure. And so a new and complicated effect—excitement—is stirred into the brew; excitement introduces the possibility of pleasure. Second, in perversion, we find that the anxiety is not some generalized state of oedipal alarm. Instead—I hypothesize—in childhood, one was truly threatened with a danger to one’s sexuality: to parts of the body capable of erotic pleasure (not just sensual pleasure) or to one’s masculinity or femininity. The dangerous person was aiming at—is felt as having wanted to aim at—one’s sex or one’s gender identity. The blow was struck at just those parts of body or identity that distinguish the sexes or at the freedom to use these parts in the search to distinguish the sexes clearly. This trauma was very severe, by which I mean (as with traumatic neurosis) that it was prolonged too far, or else hit too suddenly or when one was too young for adequate defense. Intensity, suddenness, and incomprehensibility of a danger that threatens one's psychic sexual apparatuses set one up for a perversion (1, 54). A perversion, I repeat, is a sexual—an erotized— neurosis. In the other neuroses—those whose primary symptoms are anxiety, depression, phobias, compulsions, and so forth—the attack is directed at other parts of the body or psyche, not those that distinguish the sexes. (Here, probably, we pay the price for Freud’s insistence that sensuality and sexuality are the same in childhood—because they often converge. Had he not so insisted, the perversions might have long since been seen as just one category of the neuroses.) And in perversions, in contrast to the other neuroses, resolution is sensationally rewarded—by great erotic pleasure.
Perhaps when the trauma is complete (if that is possible), no perversion results; rather, a function is simply wiped out. (There are people, physically intact, who have never been sexually excited.) Perversion, one may expect, is the result of damage, not destruction; hope still remains. “Risk” implies that. Risk indicates odds for and against success; human ingenuity may find a detour or substitute or, on occasion, perform a truly creative act to lift perversion into art.
The original trauma and the struggle that went on, out of sight, for years of childhood till surfacing in the overt, genitally discharged perversion, are memorialized in the act’s details (chap. 5). And so is the rage that trauma produced in the child and that had to be subdued if life was to go on. We can expect, therefore, to find fantasies of revenge against the traumatizer, primarily mother, sometimes father. (When perverse, we are less of a threat to others to the extent we differentiate the immediate object of today’s desire from the original object, who frustrated the great impulses of infancy and childhood. Obviously, the more one equates one’s immediate object with the object who originally forced one to create the perverse dynamics, the more dangerous the perversion. The man with a clothing fetish only soils his immediate object, a piece of apparel; a rapist or sex murderer has scarcely disguised—kept unconscious—the immensity of his hatred for his original object.) Therein lies another source of the sense of risk, for one cannot be sure that the subsequent representatives of the traumatizer, one’s later sexual objects, will not, so one imagines, see one’s motives (as do one's earlier objects, now residing in the superego) and inflict punishment for the sin of revenge. To spin out the sexual act and fantasy—to recapitulate the running of the risk—but this time without the old trauma being inflicted again, without the punishment for one’s arrogance in attempting this audacious act (the perversion), or without the bound rage against the traumatizers bursting into consciousness, sweeps one to a burst of joy, the sign of which is the orgasm. (Freud [32, p. 154]: “The fetish ... remains a token of triumph over the threat of castration and a protection against it.’’) Such patients typically describe their orgasms as being of the greatest pleasure; this could be an exaggeration to justify the perversion. It has been my impression, however, in listening to such descriptions, that the patients really were describing a most intense experience.