Working this third way, however, does not indicate a belief that sexual aberrations can be adequately understood by such study; my work is at best complementary to the main body of psychoanalytic findings. We need to draw on data gathered from all three methods.
Perversion, then, is the result of family dynamics that, by inducing fear, force the child who yearns for full immersion in the oedipal situation (desire to possess the parent of the opposite sex and identify with the parent of the same sex) to avoid it. Heterosexuality is a complicated state in that it takes frustration and pain to produce it, and yet (different) frustration and pain also reduce it. If we are to understand this in the individuals we study, we must learn the precise nature of the frustrations and pains to help us see why the different outcomes result. One will understand the origins of perversion best if one views it as blighted heterosexuality; as we shall see, that is not true for all aberrations.
Of course, now I am in the soup, for, like other analysts, I also believe that most sexual behavior, not just that labeled perverse, is the result of life experiences, of conflicts survived and compromises imposed, so that if we look closely enough with our microscope, the idea of normality (other than normativeness) crumbles. We must, for instance, face the ubiquity of sexual pathology in heterosexuals, who are the alleged normals used when we set out to designate abnormals. Until we understand heterosexuality instead of taking it for granted as a given, we will not understand perversion. And to lessen this state of ignorance, we must begin by recalling that heterosexuality is an acquisition; we cannot brush the issue aside by saying that heterosexuality is preordained, necessary for the survival of the species and therefore biologically guaranteed. We have no right simply to accept this unproved, though sensible, biological postulate as being as true in humans as in bees or rats.
On the other hand, there are a number of aberrations that do not originate as compromises forced on one by anxiety. As I use the terms, not all aberrant sexual acts are perversions.
We need definitions now.
Part I
Definition
Chapter 1
Definitions
Let me say what I think an aberration, a variant, and a perversion are and in later chapters review data and concepts that led to the definitions. I believe that perversion does exist; that its harsh connotations reflect a dim awareness that at the core of the perverse act is desire to harm others; and that the concept should be retained, not because it is a useful propaganda weapon for preserving society, but because the condition is demonstrable.
By aberration here I mean an erotic technique or constellation of techniques that one uses as his complete sexual act and that differs from his culture’s traditional, avowed definition of normality. Sexual aberrations can be divided into two classes: variants (deviations) and perversions.
By variant I mean an aberration that is not primarily the staging of forbidden fantasies, especially fantasies of harming others. Examples would be behavior set off only by abnormal brain activity, as with a tumor, experimental drug, or electricalimpulse from an implanted electrode; or an aberrant act one is driven to faute de mieux; or sexual experiments one does from curiosity and finds not exciting enough to repeat.
Perversion, the erotic form of hatred, is a fantasy, usually acted out but occasionally restricted to a daydream (either self-produced or packaged by others, that is, pornography). It is a habitual, preferred aberration necessary for one’s full satisfaction, primarily motivated by hostility. By “hostility” I mean a state in which one wishes to harm an object; that differentiates it from “aggression,” which often implies only forcefulness. The hostility in perversion takes form in a fantasy of revenge hidden in the actions that make up the perversion and serves to convert childhood trauma to adult triumph. To create the greatest excitement, the perversion must also portray itself as an act of risk-taking.
While these definitions remove former incongruities, they impose on us the new burden of learning from a person what motivates him. But we are freed from a process of designation that did not take the subject's personality and motivation into account. We no longer need to define a perversion according to the anatomy used, the object chosen, the society’s stated morality, or the number of people who do it. All we need know is what it means to the person doing it; while this may be difficult for us to uncover, there is still no a priori reason to reject this technique for defining.
Analysts (and others) have used terms like “aberration,” “deviation,” or “perversion” as synonyms and classified an act as such according to the observer’s, not necessarily the participant’s, criteria. Then, when a theory of perversion has been established—preoedipal and oedipal conflict; oral, anal, or phallic fixation and regression; fantasies of threatening objects, such as father’s bad introjected penis or mother’s worse breast; splitting of the ego; attack or permission by a flawed superego; or whatever—the explanation is complete before one ever sees the patient. To avoid such efficiency, I am trying to force us back for information upon the actual person doing the act. By now it is notorious that the foregoing systems have been offered as explanations for every sort of behavior, which of course means they explain little; with all their strength in describing dynamics, these concepts cannot answer how perversion differs from, say, a tic, a hallucination, mania, or a craving for pickles.
For instance, it is suggested that the perverse act provides gratification because, among other listed “specific indicators of perversion,”
through it [the act] he [the prototypical patient] acted out a confrontation of idealized and degraded images of his mother ... it gratified sadistic and masochistic wishes that were otherwise unacceptable . . . castration anxiety and guilt—which he would ordinarily experience in the sexual relation—were successfully warded off by the perverse defensive system . . . the perversion acted out a forbidden wish in disguised form—specifically, both the oedipal wish and the homosexual transference ... it reenacted the primal scene ... it also reenacted childhood seduction and gratification by the parents ... it permitted actual gratification by an actual substitute object, so that the anxiety of object loss was allayed. . . . (114, p. 47)*
We may be allowed a sense of (Uja vu.
Within the usual psychoanalytic framework we assume that all sexual aberrations are energized by pathological dynamics and treat our patients—and create theory— accordingly. Then, because we use these psychoanalytic concepts to imply disturbance, we find ourselves using that paragon, “the heterosexual,” or, even vaguer, "the normal,” as the base line for measuring the pathology of those less blessed. Having done that, however, we are driven to the deceit of ignoring our knowledge of the ubiquitous malfunctioning of “the heterosexual” or our failure to find or describe “the normal.”