To summarize the risks pertinent to this discussion:*
First, conscious. What I am doing endangers me with society (outer reality and my inner estimate of that reality). If I am caught, there will be trouble.
*Other forms of risk, especially those with which we have long been familiar in our studies of the dangers inherent in the oedipsu situation, shall be ignored now, lest this presentation become endless. To go over material with which many readers, especially analysts, are familiar would entangle the thread of the present argument.
Second, conscious. What I am doing goes against my standards (conscience). If I am caught, I shall hate myself.
Third, conscious or unconscious. What I am doing my parents told me was bad when I was little. Nice children don’t do that with that.
So far, the risks are at or close to the surface, the ones people have always understood. They are not specific for perversion. The danger is perceived as stemming from being involved with forbidden anatomy: forbidden part or person of forbidden sex.
But then we get to the more primevally forbidden, and so we leave simpler erotism for hostility, rage, revenge, violence, destruction. The risks now are perceived as life-threatening to others and oneself (unconsciously in some perversions, consciously in the perversions we sense are bizarre; the sense of bizarreness is usually an intuition of intensity of hatred).
Fourth. I am filled with hatred and must not know it. Because they (the adults) so frustrated (mystified) me, my sexual freedom in childhood was taken from me. Not only were restrictions imposed on me, but—more tormenting—I was made responsible: I must sense the temptation and prevent my own actions. For all this, I am to love and respect them. Hate is wrong and shall be punished.
Fifth. My sexual desires are bad; my hatred is even worse.* If they knew its extent, they would have to de-
* Ultimately it is murderous. But when less than this, it is still awesome. To break free of that first object, mother, and establish oneself requires that a barrier be set up to help keep one from succumbing to the urge to merge with her. This piece of character structure may be sustained by fantasies of harming mother; again, a risky business. McDougall says;
The fantasy which is directed to the phallic castration of the paternal image hides another which is the castration of the feeding mother. If the first wish may be said to threaten the individual himself with castration, the second produces anxiety linked to depression, to fear of psychic disintegration and to death.
stroy me. But this violence is mine, part of the essential me that is evil and yet must be protected, preserved. It is hidden in what I desire erotically.
Sixth. For all this that was done to me, I shall enjoy revenge, which too shall be in the sexual act. But if I aim to harm my object, it may sense that and do unto me at least as I would do unto it. And that is most risky, indeed.
Perversion is hatred, erotized hatred.
Safety Factors
Triumph requires overcoming odds, but if the danger in adult life were as severe as it had been in childhood, pleasure would be absent and thus there would be no perversion. So devices—safety factors—must be built into the fantasy to reduce anxiety and guarantee that the odds are decisively loaded in favor of triumph. Their traces are everywhere in the micro-elements that make up the perverse fantasy or behavior. Here are random samples. Take the fetish: it is absolutely passive and so cannot threaten, interfere, witness, or accuse; it can be attacked, dirtied, hated, destroyed, and yet it is infinitely renewable . . . The obscene telephone caller does not
These aggressive-castrative wishes with their accompanying anxieties are held in check through compulsive sexual behaviour which takes on the characteristics of a play or a game with rigid rules, and leads to a form of object relation dominated by the same defensive mechanisms: disavowal and negation, splitting and projection, instinctual regression, manic defence.
As in childhood the game functions in the service of mastering traumatic events and states, and permits the individual to play at things he may not carry into action (libidinal and aggressive wishes); it also permits of a reversal of roles which often takes the form of controlling the orgastic response of the partner, this “loss of control” being regarded as a castration of the partner, or a reduction of his status to that of a helpless child.
He plays in fantasy at being the only one to enjoy the father's penis and the only one to enjoy the maternal breasts; in conse-
3uence he may possess ana punish these objects. Thus the esperate sexual game allows the recovery in fantasy of lost objects as well as the erotization of the defences against the forbidden wishes. (103, pp. 373-374)
confront his victim and have to suffer the knowledge that she is only a human . . . The prostitute is paid to be agreeable and to indulge in acts she might otherwise spurn . . . The transvestite hopes to convert his wife to helping him cross-dress . . .
Clinical Material
The following case exemplifies how risk and revenge are formed into excitement in perversion. Even to this man, many of the dynamics of his hostility are obvious. (He is not a patient, and the origins of his behavior are unknown.)
He is a male hustler, that is, a homosexual male prostitute of avowedly masculine demeanor. He has an invariant method of operation in the street. Only when a potential customer signals interest from a car* will he make a move. Then he walks over to the car, but he does not touch it, not even to open the door. He simply stands and waits for his customer to make the next move; not until being invited into the car does he enter. He sits down, waits to be spoken to, and then, in apparent passivity, is taken wherever the customer wishes. He does not suggest the price, the length of time, the place, or the type of sexual acts but waits for the customer to request and then answers. Experienced and wise, he picks up, from questions or remarks, what fantasies will be enacted. When, for instance, he is to be an ignorant but strong, uneducated animal, the customer will indicate that by remarking on the hustler’s physique, suggesting in a question that he works in a laboring trade; the hustler agrees and invents a few details to please his customer. In other words, he assists his partner in the
*In Los Angeles, because the automobile is a necessary part of lifestyle, in certain areas and at certain times of the day the standard operating procedure is for the customers to be cruising in cars rather than on foot.
latter’s fantasy but establishes that he was hired and is therefore not the instigator. Rarely having orgasms while hustling and thus working many customers without sexual exhaustion, he can play at this activity indefinitely.
Yet to say he is perverse simply because homosexual is to miss essential details—and thus dynamics. It is important to note that all the foregoing is the perversion, not just the anatomical homosexual act. He reveals this when he remarks that whenever he is having trouble getting an erection—and it is important to do so or the customer feels cheated—he need only think of the foreplay to renew himself. The foreplay is the ritual whereby the customer shows a craving for him, the hustler, the labeled servant. (The victim, the inferior, thus becomes superior, the victor.) His greatest excitement, however, is when he recalls that money passed hands; sometimes, his sexual powers depleted, he will ask for payment in advance in order to have the vision of the money itself on reserve during the sexual act. He may even put the money out where he can watch it during intercourse, for actually seeing that money, which was given to him by the customer, is the greatest excitement. One would be slipshod to call the money a fetish, however; although it is inanimate and although seeing it causes him to feel excitement, it is not the money per se that provokes this. He does not get excited by money just any time, as would, for instance, a transvestite with women’s clothes. Rather it is the conscious knowledge of what the money stands for that causes the excitement.