In both perversion and “normal sexuality” we have found several themes: as the sexual act unfolds, fantasy risks are run that are experienced as being surmounted; inside the sexual excitement are desires—conscious and unconscious—to harm others in order to get revenge for past traumas and frustrations; the sexual act serves to transform childhood trauma into adult triumph; trauma, risk, and revenge establish a mood of excitement that is intensified when they are packaged as mystery.
The ideas just reviewed serve only to complement our knowledge of the origins of sin in the conflicts arising out of the earliest stages of infantile and childhood development, arranged conceptually as oral, anal, phallic, and oedipal. The ruthless possessiveness and destructive urges of early life, more or less encapsulated by those psychic experiences we call the superego, provide data and a framework essential for understanding the sense of sin. Attending to the anger and cruelty that arise in the early frustrations and traumas allows us to trace how these feelings and their accompanying sense of victimization are converted to sexual pleasure.
This knowledge of the dynamics of hostility in excitement can lead those so inclined into concerns about ethics and morality, since these latter institutions deal with the modulation of hostility among individuals or inside the mind of each. If ethics and morality serve society by defining and dealing with sin, then this exploration of sexual excitement suggests that the ethics and morality of sexual behavior intuitively probe to reach and subdue these dynamics of hostility. Perhaps if this probing can be raised to consciousness, we can decrease the hostility—which in the extreme reaches levels of perversion—that the ethical and moral systems of reform use as a counterforce to sin. And as a strategy of social action perhaps those who wish to increase sexual freedom ought not to lean too heavily on the argument that the sense of sin exists only as an effect of one’s enslavement by repressive historical processes. The sense of sin may not disappear simply because we announce that it is outdated, and the complex richness of human sexual excitement will be missed if we exclude sin from our studies.
If these ideas on perversion were accepted, the function of the courts would be simpler. If it was known that almost all sexual behavior has in it traces of the perversion mechanism and therefore that perverse impulses and acts are universal (this is, of course, already known, though not yet acknowledged in the law), the criterion for decision about crime need not be: Was perversion present? Instead—a more sensible, just way to define a crime—a judge or jury need only decide if a hostile act had been committed that caused damage to persons or property in the degree that the penal code feels is significant for nonsexual crimes; let the same criterion hold.
This would be a decision not requiring “expert”— psychiatric—opinions.
Of course, this discussion falls into absurdity if we forget that all sins are not equal. The fantasy of rape is not rape, and the transvestite’s unconscious fantasy of revenge leads to nothing more violent than his masturbating into a lady’s hat. The presence of the sense of sin, therefore, may not be related to real violence, and fortunately the laws governing sexual behavior, though usually dim-witted, sometimes take this into account.
Psychoanalysts take to discussing morals and ethics like drunkards to drink. I do not wish to serve as one more grand master of sexual behavior, to judge if sexual freedom damages or enriches society, or to pronounce what laws should be created and how enforced to reflect our morality. But there is one concern I think is worthy of emphasis: if we deny the hostility and dehumanization in the fantasies that make for sexual excitement—if we say sin is not there—we are denying the obvious, and that is foolish.
There are those for whom, in their orthodoxy, sin and personal responsibility are the keystone of the structure of society: each of us shall know, weigh, and harvest the consequences of our behavior. The thesis, then, that sexual excitement and the need to harm one’s objects are closely related makes control of sex not only the domain of personal dynamics but at the same time a political affair.
Those nonfanatics who think in terms of sex as sin start from a position similar to mine: when, out of anxiety, we dehumanize our sexual objects, we minimize ourselves and forgo the best of being human—the capacity to love. Thus, believe the ones who hold this most vehemently, it hardly serves society to encourage its own dissolution by propaganda for libertinism, by pornography, by loosening the laws, or by laboratory research on human sexual behavior (67). On the other hand, if we discourage dehumanization by curbing unlimited infantile sexuality in children, adolescents, and adults, our reward will be the power of love. Such a stand is courageous if not almost suicidal, for, in opposing the right to perversion, they try to impede a powerful impulse now moving our society. Those who articulate such conservatism not only ask for attack from the new intellectual and moral majorities on the left, but they must also abide, as colleagues, the political cannonballs on the right who for generations have held the same ground they defend.
Theoretical support for such argument comes from two groups that usually do not lie down together: the inspirational psychologists (such as May, Polanyi, and Frankl) and the psychoanalysts (such as Freud and Khan). From the first persuasion, whose basic premise is that man is good when not corrupted, is drawn the moral strength to ask for “sanctions” to preserve this good, with the argument that love, with its lasting commitment to another’s presence, requires sexual restraint. And so, if we are to preserve what is most valuable in human relations, we must oppose the enemy of love—sexual license (“fascistic,” “schizoid,” "delusional” [67]).
The second ideology, psychoanalysis, demonstrates that hostility lies at the center of perversion and thus can serve to strengthen the conviction of those who feel that the present increase of sexual freedom is evil (see [76] for a review). Freud’s discovery that sexual aberrations result from traumatic disruption of infantile development serves as the background. Khan’s findings have broadened our understanding of the meaning and function of perversions, such as the use of others as things (dehumanization) rather than as people and as objects of envy and greed instead of love; the use of manipulative techniques of intimacy to exploit partners in perversion; the falsification of one’s self; and perversion as an act rather than a true relationship between people (75, 76). One cannot doubt, after a review of such findings, that perversion is not—in the way a variant is—just “an alternative way of life,” as some apologists today would have it. The argument is clearly made, as it has been since Freud, that capacity for sexual pleasure in perversion can be retained only with some sacrifice of the humanness of one's objects and by crippling one’s self. When one must reduce people to things, love—with its binding of hatred —cannot persist.
These, then, are the two pieces used to construct the conservative thesis: first, that unchecked sexuality dehumanizes erotic life and thus thwarts love, and second, that the need to dehumanize, which has its origins in traumatic, conflict-laden childhood experiences, is built from hostility.
I agree, yet disapprove of the solution to which the conservatives come: punish. They are law-and-order men. Their call for action requires, in the absence of a population of mature people capable of nonperverse loving, acts of repression by society upon its citizens to force containment of perversity. But maturity—despite what political philosophers hope—is hardly ever the product of political action, and the psychoanalyst cannot help but imagine the forms perversion and its attendant hatred take when driven underground. If only love could be created in a populus by sexual restraint; but when has there been a civilization whose health was the result of suppression of unlimited sexuality? (When was there— what is—a healthy civilization?) If only love did not also require the dynamics of infancy and childhood; if only it could be created de novo in adults by exhortation and law. If only it were true that love is so inherent in people that we could count on its emergence with a few tightenings of the law. If only neurosis were an aberration and less part of the state of man. This demand for restraint is no more than modestly utopian; it is not hard to believe that the less hatred there is in intimacy the happier the outcome for the participants. But the program for turning hatred to love by police action has not been a successful experiment in the past. Besides—as others have noted— utopias are calm but dull (and dangerous); without the perverse—those who cannot bear sustained intimacy —we may be denied most of our artists, scientific discoverers, moral leaders, political geniuses, and great philosophers.