A fourth necessity served by perversion is the survival of the species. Paradoxically, while its dynamics lead, in a few families, to the eventual destruction of children’s capacity to reproduce, perversion, as Freud defined it and as we have discussed (chap. 10), is an effort at preserving heterosexuality.
While the oedipal situation, that product of the heterosexual family, damages emerging heterosexuality with its threats and anxieties, it also tantalizes the growing child with its possibilities for safety, affection, and physical pleasure. And so, I suggest along with others, neither heterosexuality nor the family is inevitable or eternal. Rather, both—primarily social creations—work to strengthen each other, and both have created their myths that each is an eternal verity (considered God-given by the religious and gene-given by the scientific).
In many cases, the desire for preserving the species is retained only in the unconscious of the perverse—that victimized heterosexual manqui; but more frequently, the childhood trauma and frustration are resolved less drastically. A tattered heterosexuality remains so that the survivor of the family’s dynamics can manage genitally, and in rare cases, can even succeed well enough to build in turn what society at present still demands: a family that will one day reproduce itself.
Additional advantages (though not necessities) accrue once perversion has been invented. For instance, since its central dynamic is hostility, perversion serves to channel murderous hatred out into the calmer currents of the imagination, such as religion, art, pornography, and daydreams. These deflections are almost always preferable to the direct expression of the forces they contain and trap in the unconscious. This dispersion of rage serves our four main necessities, by providing a more joyous and guilt-reduced erotic pleasure, by lowering the murder rate in families (both the family to which the child belonged and that formed by the child-become-adult), by binding into erotic pleasure and exhaustion energies that might otherwise break society open,* and by deflecting the hatred that can build up between the sexes so that, at least for a few moments, men and women can stand what too often seems each other’s otherwise unbearable total presence.
In other words, like all other conditions produced by neurotic mechanisms so stabilized and efficient that we call them character structure, perversion serves as the only workable complex of compromises; it draws off enough rage and despair that society and the individual are not completely unstrung by the otherwise destructive tendencies arising from infantile frustration and trauma in the family.
•The preference of fanatical revolutionaries for sexual abstinence is a perversion that subdues the hostility present inside the family (party), letting it be released for destruction of those outside.
As long as there are infants, society will invent ways to raise them, and, in raising them, will shape their sexual desire. Not knowing what will come if the family disappears, we cannot know how human sexuality will, in adapting, be modified. My guess is that if all goes well for our race, perversion will die down and variance increase. Perhaps someday perversion will not be necessary.
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