Once the body part (or an inanimate, related object such as a garment) has been split off from the whole human object, one needs another process—idealization —for reinventing the new object.t The hostility (potential destruction of the object) Boating around in the latent fantasies that energize the perversion must be neutralized and positively, pleasurably, erotically infused or there will be no perversion. At this point in the process, the destructive oral, anal, and phallic qualities so well known in the perversions must be kept within bounds. This is scarcely possible in states of dyscontrol such as borderline or overt psychoses, conditions noted for their primitive, grossly hostile (and therefore bizarre) sexual acts. Then we find that objects must be truly—not
*And long before (hat, Freud said, “No other variation of the sexual instinct that borders on the pathological can lay so much claim to our interest as this one [fetishism]” (24, p. 153). To what extent is sexual fetishization synonymous with perversion?
tPositive transference is another, obvious instance of this reinvention.
symbolically—harmed or even destroyed, soiled with excrement (or words), or slashed, wounded, and physically brutalized.
On examining pornography we found dehumanization, fetishization, and reinvention. Aspects of sexuality are chosen in which are focused the essentials of the perverse dynamics, for example, in the mildest of the heterosexual male pornographies, photographs of nudes. These reduce the actual woman to a twodimensional, frozen creature helplessly impaled on the page, so that she cannot defend herself or strike back, as she might in the real world. Even if she has a dangerous look about her, that implied risk is negated by her imprisonment on the paper. She can be insulted, dirtied, forced to act according to the viewer’s will, and remain uncomplaining, smiling, or even phallic— whatever is necessary—but immobile. And she is not only displayed, available for any fantasied sexual hostility, she is also idealized. She does no harm, she brings satisfaction, she is aesthetic perfection (if not, another picture is chosen), she is retouched, she infinitely repairs herself, she demands no revenge, she is absolutely co-operative, she keeps secrets, she costs nothing in money or time, she need not be understood, she has no needs of her own: ideal (cf. 42). No wonder she becomes a bore (121).
While it is more difficult to get the same compliance when actually performing a perversion than when imagining it in pornography or daydreams, the properly planned perversion still permits one to choose objects in the real world that can be dealt with in this way. Thus, for instance, fetishism (the use of inanimate objects), or the use of prostitutes (humans hired to act like puppets), or the choice of people, like the transvestite’s compliant wife, whose own neuroses complement—that is, find use for—the perverse act.
Khan discusses how through the
technique of intimacy ... the pervert induces and coerces another person into becoming an accomplice [by establishing] a make-believe situation involving in most cases the willing seduced cooperation of an external object.
. . . There is always, however, one proviso. The pervert himself cannot surrender to the experience and retains a split-off, dissociated, manipulative ego-control of the situation. (76, pp. 399, 402)
(In fact, Khan’s is an accurate description of all seduction, which is too often a hostile, power-seeking, fetishiz-ing business.) One who turns his objects into fetishes reduces his capacity for intimacy so that his own human dimension comes to have no greater measure than that of the fetish he creates (chooses).
Splitting, dehumanization, fetishization, and idealization result from failure of empathy and diminished or inhibited capacity to identify with others. Or is this backwards? The natural state of humans may, rather, be no more than a meager capacity for empathy, with analysts, artists, saints, and psychotics having an aberrant hypertrophy of this masochistic mechanism.
Theorizing, quoting authorities, and a clinical vignette hardly prove a thesis. Yet I believe if one applies these suggestions about the essential role of self-preservation plus hostility—risk, revenge, and triumph—to patients, one’s own or those published, the ideas will hold up. This will be true in the behaviors in which risk is part of the overt content, such as genital exhibitionism, physical masochism, transvestism, compulsive promiscuity, or voyeurism; in those in which revenge is overt, such as rape, sadism, soiling one’s objects with excrement or words; or in those where both risk and revenge are hidden, as in that paradigm, fetishism.
Chapter 8
Symbiosis Anxiety and the Development of Masculinity
In the Introduction, I noted that my thinking about perversion grew from research on the development of masculinity and femininity. This present chapter shows in more detail how the two areas of study may be related in the earliest period of life and turns to the question why most of the perversions are practiced by men, not women. The development of women, from infancy on, is certainly full of trauma, frustration, anxiety, and conflict. The state of the art of psychoanalytic explanation these days is adequate to explain why women are as perverse as men, but it does not have available an argument why they are not.
One might reach for global biological answers—males are different from females. That can always serve as an argument in lieu of specifics. But I think fuller explanation can be found in the world of interpersonal relationships, in intrapsychic dynamics, and in the study of the forces of culture; only in defeat need we fall back on the untestable—biologizing.
Although the psychoanalyst rarely has the chance to observe it, there can be too much of a good thing. We spend most of the time of our practice and theory strug-
gling with the effects of trauma, frustration, and deprivation; we know that careless, inept, minimal, or hostile mothering damages a child. But even the work of major analytic theorists who have turned our attention to more benign processes in personality development has not fully warned us of the powerful effect too much gratification can have in certain aspects of development.
The primeval symbiotic goodness both mother and infant experience may not only support but also threaten psychic development: that symbiosis, if too intense or too prolonged, can damage developing masculinity. Even the most competent mothering throws a burden on the infant male, and a mother who would try to spare her son that burden can completely submerge his innate potentials for masculinity.
Two Theories of Masculine Development
Masculinity in males, according to Freud, comes from three main sources: biological factors, primary heterosexuality (desire for mother) starting as soon after birth as the process of comprehension begins, and identification with father’s masculinity as the oedipal conflict is resolved (24). A corollary of this theory is that maleness is the superior state in the mind of mankind—the penis the more respected sexual organ and masculine ambition and achievement the more desired activities for both sexes. Another is that women are inferior, for they have inferior genitals, and from the start they are homosexually oriented, their first love being of the same sex (33).
In chapter 2,1 noted my belief that this theory is partly wrong in that the second source noted above—males’ primary heterosexuality—needs correcting. More than anything else, the mother-infant symbiosis measures the mistake.
Let us run through the theory briefly once more, adding this factor of symbiosis. While it is true that the infant boy’s first love object is his mother, there is an earlier phase in which he is merged with her before she exists as a separate object; that is, he has not yet distinguished his own body and psyche as different from hers—and she is a female with a feminine gender identity. It is possible, then, that the boy does not start heterosexual, as Freud presumed, but rather that he must separate himself from his mother’s female body and femininity and experience a process of individuation into masculinity. Heterosexuality in males is an achievement, not also, as Freud said, a given; if this hypothesis can be confirmed, then masculinity is not the naturally occurring state Freud said it was. Some rudiment of femininity is. We must look to see if it is not so that the first, the primeval, phase in developing masculinity is a feminine one.