Alienation in Perversions

Masud Khan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367099633
• eBook ISBN: 9780429910685
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Perversions and borderline states were, by accident of fate, Masud Khan's chief preoccupation in his clinical work during the last three decades of his life. In an earlier volume, The Privacy of the Self, he presented what he called the natural and private crystallization of his experience with his patients and teachers; notably, in the latter category, Anna Freud, John Rickman and D.W. Winnicott. In this later book he takes his cue from Freud who, as he says, diagnosed the sickness of Western Judaeo-Christian cultures in terms of "the person alienated from himself". Masud Khan's basic argument, succinctly stated in his Preface, is that "the pervert puts an impersonal object between his desire and his accomplice. This object can be a stereotype fantasy, a gadget or a pornographic image. All three alienate the pervert from himself, as, alas, from the object of desire".With its wealth of clinical and theoretical insights, Masud Khan's Alienation in Perversions makes a major contribution to our understanding of perversion formation.

1
Reparation to the Self as an Idolized Internal Object

The human individual at the beginning is not a subject but an object. The human infant exists and experiences itself only through the mother’s idolizing attention, hence he is the object of the maternal care. In recent years we have been so indoctrinated by a certain type of theorizing which argues that the infant’s psyche is a cauldron of infinite and relentless anxieties and conflicts, that we tend to forget that at first the infant exists only as the object of the mother’s care and love. Gradually as the maturational processes release the various ego and id apparatuses, the infant will begin to assemble self-representations that can then be described as the subjective self. As Winnicott has repeatedly pointed out, the biological givens and endowments in an infant are dependent on the actual maternal (environmental) care and facilitation for their articulation, differentiation and fruition, developmentally and maturationally, into what can later be identified as functions and properties of the ego and the id in the child. Winnicott especially stresses the necessity of a mother’s capacity to meet imaginatively as well as affectively the first creative gestures of the infant-child and this forms the basis of the child’s true confidence in his evolving and crystallizing sense of self.

The Concept of Reparation

One significant process involved in this complex interplay and confrontation between the infant and his environment (human and non-human) is that of reparation. Winnicott has described this variously as the environment meeting the infant’s ‘experience of omnipotence’, allowing itself to be created by the infant as in the area of transitional object and phenomena, and allowing the infant to make his own contribution towards his caretaking environment. In Winnicott’s frame of reference the reparative drive and process is an expression of the natural potential of the libidinal cum aggressive cum imaginative-affective forces operative in the infant-child’s psyche-soma. Winnicott, unlike Klein, does not restrict the use of reparative drive to that of mitigating and neutralizing the damage done by the sadistic instincts in the earliest stages of infancy. In his theory, if for some personal or other reasons the mother fails to meet the reparative (creative) drive of the infant, then it leads to an imbalance in the whole articulation of the emergent ego-id differentiation and entails defensive use of the reparative drive (1948a). The reparative drive therefore uses all the available emergent ego-id processes to make a contribution towards the caretaking environment (human and non-human) and establishes the matrix of confidence in relating to and being creative towards this environment. And since this contribution (reparation) is reflected and mirrored back as achievement by the environment it leads to confidence in the growing sense of personal identity and in the authenticity of self-experiences in psyche and soma.

The Reparative Drive in Perversion-Formation

From the intensive analytic treatment of some dozen cases of perversion over the past twenty years a distinct pattern of early mother-child relationship leading to choice of perverse sexual practices (heterosexual as well as homosexual) has begun to crystallize in my thinking. All these cases were as infants and children much loved by their mothers. It is significant that though in every case the father was alive and around in the child’s experience he was not registered as a significant presence or person. The mother lavished intense body-care on the infant-child but in a rather impersonal way. The child was treated by the mother as her ‘thing-creation’ rather than as an emergent growing person in his or her own right. It is this idolization of the infant-child that I am singling out for special emphasis and discussion. I am advisedly using the concept of idolization instead of idealization. To me the two processes seem distinct and different. Idealization is an intrapsychic process and is very much influenced by reverie. Idolization on the contrary is an explicit over-cathexis of an external actual object and is sustained by elaborate ego-attitudes and ego-functions which subsume id-investments and intensify these in the service of idolization. Idolization therefore entails a mental exploitation of instinctual components and primitive psychic processes in the relationship to an external actual object, in this case the infant-child. My clinical work here corresponds very closely to that reported by Greenacre (1960a).

To elaborate my argument a step further. In this climate of mother-child relationship, the child very early on begins to sense that what the mother cathects and invests in is at once something very special in him and yet not him as a whole person. The child learns to tolerate this dissociation in his experience of self and gradually turns the mother into his accomplice in maintaining this special created-object. The next step in this developmental schema is that the child internalizes this idolized self that was the mother’s created-thing. This, in my clinical material, usually happens around the oedipal phase when these mothers suddenly become self-conscious about their intensive attachment to and investment in their child and withdraw abruptly. Hence these children seem to experience a belated separation-trauma at a stage where their ego can register it more acutely. They register this as panic and threat of annihilation and especially as abandonment (unconsciously). It is in this inner affective climate that they intensify the cathexis of their internalized idolized self and also hide it from their environment.

Two further features seem to be characteristic of this type of childhood: absence of playing and transitional objects. At first I missed these because the concept of transitional object was not as yet available to me. Only the genius finds what he is not looking for, the rest of us have to be content with re-discovering the discovered for ourselves. The lack of playing and transitional objects is further matched by a lack of initiative to contribute of these children. While they are astonishingly empathic to their mothers’ moods they seem to resign prematurely from offering anything from their side. Instead they learn to augment the mothers’ efforts and gestures towards them as the special created-thing. A child in such circumstances learns a specialized use of his reparative drive, i.e. towards the self as an idolized internal object.

I shall at this point jump a few stages and try to abstract the dilemma of this type of child at puberty and adolescence. All my cases seem to arrive at puberty and adolescence in a state of organized innocence. They had little capacity for sexual reverie and their first attempts at masturbation were pathetically unsatisfactory. They felt shut in, almost claustrophobic, rather depersonalized with a distinctly schizoid type of personality and yet seething with a latent urgency towards life and others, which they couldn’t actualize in life-experience or contemporary object-relationships. Hence they felt eager and disregarded, intensely subjective and yet dull and depleted, full of themselves and with nothing to offer to others, and above all else special. They had a distinct secret sense of waiting to be found and met. It is in such an inner climate of strangulated affectivity and instinctual tension that an opportunity or encounter with someone would provide them with an opening into life.

It is true of each of my patients that none of them ventured out from personal initiative at first. After the first few adventures the role of the ego-initiative changes – some remained passive vis-à-vis the object, others learnt to seek it militantly. For a long time I was deeply perplexed and confused by the character and style of their object-choice, object-finding and object-relating. With a little distortion I could always satisfy myself that it was narcissistic object-choice or regression to the part-object phase of early libido development, but none of this really fitted all the facts. Gradually I began to see that one of the unmistakable features of the chosen and found sexual object was its potentiality and talent to play the part of an as-if transitional object. But even that left a great deal of the richness of the patient’s experience of self and object in the relationship unaccounted for. It was only when I was convinced that the gratification from sexual discharge is a screen-experience in these patients directed against anxiety states, and that the basic use of sexual apparatuses and instincts is of a reparative kind, that the clinical picture began to yield more clues.

The next question is towards whom is that reparative drive directed. One could not say the object as a person in himself nor the object as an idealized image of the patient’s self. I felt there was some very important factor missing. Only an unprejudiced scrutiny of these patients’ intensive and elaborate ego-interests and sexual rapport with their objects has helped me to realize that what was being enacted was a very special type of early relationship from childhood. This relationship, in spite of all the overt and ecstatic awareness of what they were doing, was hidden from the patient himself, and it in essence was a repetition of the mother’s idolization of the infant-child as her created-object, which the child had internalized and hidden. The characteristics of this type of perverse sexual intimacy and relatedness between two persons (heterosexual or homosexual) are: (a) that both parties have a silent ritualistic acceptance of the play quality of the relationship. In spite of all their vociferous remonstrances to the contrary it is understood that the whole venture is transitional and uncommitting; (b) that the relationship in its true detail is private, secretive and something very special between the two persons concerned; (c) that each is in fact doing it as a reparative gesture towards the other. This is what makes it benign. The element of hostile and sadistic exploitation of the other is kept low to a minimum; (d) that each will grow larger and more whole as a person from the venture; (e) in spite of protestations of perpetual fidelity and devotion, each knows that separation and loss are inevitable and will not be too traumatic; (f) a basic shared sense of gratitude at the time at having been allowed a mute and unshareable experience.

The next and important question that needs to be answered at this point is: why does the reparative drive in these persons choose the sexual apparatuses and modalities as the basic vehicle of its expression. In my clinical experience perverts are not persons who impress one with being endowed with a biologically high or intense natural sexual appetite and drive. In my clinical experience I have yet to meet a pervert who was compelled from the authentic instinctual pressure of his body-impulses to reach out to an object for gratification. It is all engineered from the head and then instinctual apparatuses and functions are zealously exploited in the service of programmed sexuality. And how does it come about that the reparative drive expresses itself only in relation to the sexual object? Because outside such relationships these people were all very selfish, impatient, patently unempathic and ungenerous as well as mean and coldly aloof towards others. The answer partially lies in the way they suffered the restriction and negation of their reparative drive in childhood at the hands of their mothers. A person has to have special attributes as a thing-person to trigger off their interest. They cannot offer any reparative gesture towards anyone who is to start with separate and defined as an entity in his or her own right. Also the potential object must share their bias for body-language communication. The soma of an infant-child is available to a mother’s imprinting from a much earlier stage than his differentiated psyche (ego), and this compliance potential of an infant-child’s soma is greater than the more developed and mature child’s ego. Hence the bias is to regress to that phase and modality of interrelationship.

Furthermore I think the very subtle and discreet inhibitions of emergent aggressive potential in these children as infants play a role here too. Such mothers distract, diffuse and negate the aggressive gestures in the infant-child’s reparative drive that draws upon his body-musculature. This leads to expressions of aggression in rage-reactions which are then dealt with by a precocious development of defensive ego-mechanisms. When these patients sought out accomplices they had, as it were, a latent wisdom in choosing objects who would not involve their ego too directly and explicitly, otherwise their phobic and paranoid anxieties and defences would come precipitately into action and spoil the whole venture. This is a problem we get stuck with quite often in the treatment of schizoid characters with acute selective sexual inhibitions. The sexual intimacies anticipate a privacy and seclusion from public view and allow for private symbolism and rituals to be tried out, learnt and taught. They are relatively at one remove from the exigencies of ordinary reality and value-systems. Another factor is that in all perversions there is a definite lack of elaboration of body-experiences into psychic reverie. The overt fantasies of perverts are patently banal and repetitive.

There is one last point I want to state. All perversions entail a fundamental alienation from self in the person concerned and the attempt is to find personalization through the elaborate machinery of sexual experiences. The inconsolability of the pervert is matched only by his insatiability. The researches of Freud and his followers have gone a long way towards providing us with true clues to the predicament of the pervert, without all the mystifications of moral approbation or the envious adulation of the seemingly liberal social approach. But the predicament of the pervert is still far from clear. The experiential data is so cluttered with secondary elaborations and gains as well as distortions that even knowing as such constitutes a trap. What we need to establish more firmly is the positive trends that lie buried under the debris of the erotic expertise of the pervert. It is towards an understanding of this that I think a clearer definition of the role of the reparative drive towards the self as an idolized internal object may serve as a deeper understanding of this predicament.

So long as the pervert seeks to make the reparation to his own idolized self, either through masturbatory practices or through projective identification with another who represents his idolized internal self, there is no possibility of true relating or mutuality. It is important to distinguish three components in a pervert’s relation to himself and to his object, namely idolization, idealization and narcissistic identification. In idolization the object is treated as a sacred fetish. In idealization only some aspect of the object is invested with an exaggerated intensity of virtue. In narcissistic identification the object is used to mirror the self in a defensive attempt to hide feelings of inferiority and unworthiness in the self.

In the transference of these patients one sees these processes very clearly. When the patient needs to be idolized any gesture of the analyst that indicates his separateness is felt to be traumatic and annihilating. The dependence on the analyst for total acceptance is maximal. The analyst has to make the reparation so that differentiated personalization can begin to operate. When the idealized self is presented by the patient often there is a subtle denigration of the analyst. In the case of narcissistic identification the demand is for an intimacy of effort and relating rather than working with the analyst.

2
Intimacy, Complicity and Mutuality in Perversions

André Gide quotes Oscar Wilde as saying:

There are two kinds of artists: some bring answers and the others bring questions. You must know whether you are one of those who answer or one of those who question; for the one who questions is never the one who answers. There are works that wait and are not understood for a long time, because they brought answers to questions that had not yet been asked; for the question often comes a frightfully long time after the answer. (Delay, 1963.)

Freud was one of those rare minds that gave us the answers in relation to which we are gradually learning to ask the right questions. When Freud characterized perversions as the negative of neuroses he had established a distinction the full meaning of which is beginning to be explored only now through the researches in ego-psychology and infant-mother relationship. The paradigmatic syndromes for the classical analytic theory and technique were the neurotic conditions of hysteria and obsessional neurosis. In both these cases the ego can be considered to have achieved intactness and coherence. The dysfunctions and disabilities that it experiences are due to its attempts to find a modus vivendi between the imperious and archaic demands of the instincts and the inexorable limits imposed by external reality. In its attempts to find a solution the ego uses defence mechanisms which either impair its effectiveness or lead to gross repressions of instinctual modalities. In cases of severe conflict the ego’s relation to reality itself can suffer distortion. It is generally accepted that in these cases the ego does not lose its essential coherence or unity. Clinical syndromes where the very character of the ego has suffered pathological deformation were designated by Freud as ‘narcissistic neuroses’; they were not thought to be readily accessible to analytic technique or therapy. In the transference neuroses, as against narcissistic neuroses, the capacity for object-cathexes remains intact, in spite of all the inhibitions and repressions (Freud, 1916–17). In recent decades advances in analytic technique and a deeper understanding of the transference relationship and the analytic situation have made it possible to explore clinically the nature of ego-pathology in narcissistic neuroses (Balint, 1950; Stone, 1961; Winnicott, 1955). Here the treatment of perversions comes into the forefront of our clinical investigations.

In 1905, in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Freud established the role of infantile sexuality in perversions. He singled out for special emphasis two factors: the tenuous relation between the sexual instinct and the object in the practices of the perverts: ‘in them [the perverts] the sexual instincts and the sexual object are merely soldered together’; and secondly, the role of a mental mechanism which leads to idealization of the instinct in the pervert.

In the five decades since the publication of Freud’s monumental work a great deal of research has been done on the treatment of perversions (Arlow, 1954; Fenichel, 1945; Glover, 1940, 1959; Lorand and Balint, 1956; Rosen, 1964; Wiedeman, 1962). There is a consensus of opinion among psycho-analysts that in perversions it is not simply a question of ego-syntonic regression to pregenital modes of instinctual gratification. Ego-pathology is now considered to be inherent in perversion-formations. Gillespie states (1952):

I have no doubt myself that splitting of the object and of the ego, denial and omnipotent manipulations of the relation to objects play a leading part in perversion formation and help us to understand its relationship to psychosis. Melanie Klein suggests that in this early phase such mechanisms play a role similar to that of repression at a later stage. Here we have an important clue, I think, to the striking phenom...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Reparation to the Self as an Idolized Internal Object
• 2 Intimacy, Complicity and Mutuality in Perversions
• 3 The Role of Polymorph-Perverse Body-Experiences and Object-Relations in Ego-Integration
• 4 The Role of Infantile Sexuality and Early Object-Relations in Female Homosexuality
• 5 Role of the ‘Collated Internal Object’ in Perversion-Formations
• 6 Fetish as Negation of the Self
• 7 Cannibalistic Tenderness in Nongenital Sensuality
• 8 Ego-Orgasm in Bisexual Love
• 9 The Role of Will and Power in Perversions
• 10 From Masochism to Psychic Pain
• 11 Pornography and the Politics of Rage and Subversion
• Chronological Bibliography
• Bibliography
• Index