The Age of Perversion

Desire and Technology in Psychoanalysis and Culture

Danielle Knafo, Rocco Lo Bosco

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317529262
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicologia
• Subtopic: Sessualità umana in psicologia

American Boardand Academy of Psychoanalysis Book Prize Winner for 2018(Theoretical Category)

We have entered the age of perversion, an era in which we are becoming more like machines and they more like us. The Age of Perversion explores the sea changes occurring in sexual and social life, made possible by the ongoing technological revolution, and demonstrates how psychoanalysts can understand and work with manifestations of perversion in clinical settings.

Until now theories of perversion have limited their scope of inquiry to sexual behavior and personal trauma. The authors of this book widen that inquiry to include the social and political sphere, tracing perversion's existential roots to the human experience of being a conscious animal troubled by the knowledge of death. Offering both creative and destructive possibilities, perversion challenges boundaries and norms in every area of life and involves transgression, illusion casting, objectification, dehumanization, and the radical quest for transcendence.

This volume presents several clinical cases, including a man who lived with and loved a sex doll, a woman who wanted to be a Barbie doll, and an Internet sex addict. Also examined are cases of widespread social perversion in corporations, the mental health care industry, and even the government. In considering the continued impact of technology, the authors discuss how it is changing the practice of psychotherapy. They speculate about what the future may hold for a species who will redefine what it means to be human more in the next few decades than during any other time in human history.

The Age of Perversion provides a novel examination of the convergence of perversion and technology that will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists, social workers, mental health counselors, sex therapists, sexologists, roboticists, and futurists, as well as social theorists and students and scholars of cultural studies.

Part I

Theories of perversion and three clinical cases

Chapter 1

Psychoanalysis and perversion

All theories are partial; reality is complex.

– Ha-Joon Chang

As a young boy, Dr. Knafo’s patient Mark developed a fascination with maps. He played the role of navigator when his family went on trips, proud and happy to know where he was and where he was going. To know the map in detail was to know the vast spaces of the world, its lines of travel and points of connection. In his early teen years he searched out cities with suggestive names: Intercourse, Pennsylvania; Buttzville, New Jersey; Big Knob, Kentucky; Climax, Michigan; Spread Eagle, Newfoundland; Busti, New York; and Beaver Lick, Kentucky. Eventually, he began to masturbate while looking at maps, excited by his mastery of their legends, scales, latitudes, longitudes, and time zones. The key to his sexual excitement was in the body of the world. He, one of the vast billions walking the planet, small and seemingly insignificant, could embrace through his knowledge of place the entirety of humanity’s home. And that turned him on.

Jeffrey was a painfully shy and introverted child. His father (Dahmer, 1994) would later say that his son seemed oddly thrilled by the sounds animal bones made. He sensed something dark and shadowy, a malicious force growing in the boy. Utterly fascinated by dead animals, Jeffrey collected their remains in a plastic garbage bag for his private cemetery, using acid to strip the putrescent flesh from bone; once he impaled a dog’s head on a stake in his backyard. As he grew older, he nurtured fantasies of submissive or dead partners with whom he could do as he wished. Strand by strand, thought by thought, act by act, Jeffrey built his web; later, as a young adult, he sodomized, tortured, and murdered many boys and men. He then had sex with their dead bodies, dismembered them with a hacksaw, and ate their flesh. His first victim, a hitchhiker whom he had picked up and brought home, was murdered because Jeffrey didn’t want him to leave. At least 16 murders followed the first one. After he killed and ate his victims, he set aside their skulls and genitalia as trophies (Davis, 1991).

While Mark and Jeffrey are worlds apart – the former a fairly well-adjusted man and the latter a murderous psychopath – most of us would agree that the sexual lives of both men are quite unusual. We would consider Mark’s map perversion benign, even amusing. No one is harmed, mutilated, or killed, and if maps make Mark happy, then let him pore over them. Indeed, he still does, taking special delight in online electronic maps that are easy to manipulate, offer a variety of views from the satellite to the street, and can be blown up and shrunk as desired. He notes, “Google maps and Waze have added a whole new dimension to my map fetish. My friends look at porn and learn nothing. My porn is maps, but they always teach me something new. My porn is educational.” Jeffrey’s perversion, on the other hand, is a pure nightmare of terror created by a heinous criminal. The notorious tale of Jeffrey Dahmer, a timid but vicious serial killer, horrifies with its shocking revelation of perversion’s dark side: pedophilia, rape, murder, cannibalism, and necrophilia.

Should the behavior of these two men be classified under the same heading of perversion? Do they share anything other than atypical sexuality? Although they lie on opposite ends of the perversion spectrum, the erotic lives of Mark and Jeffrey have several features in common that will become apparent in this review of major psychoanalytic ideas about perversion. Rather than chronologically document the evolution of perversion theory, however, this review groups ideas by theme, while keeping in mind that psychoanalysis has focused primarily on the sexual, not social, dimension of perversion. Because the literature is vast, our review is not exhaustive. Rather, it aims to delineate a profile of perversion from a psychoanalytic perspective (one that will be supplemented in Chapter 5), expand the concept into the social frame, and further illuminate the basis of perversion’s universal quality within the existential frame.

Sigmund Freud: the universal and infantile nature of perversion

Freud placed human sexuality at the center of psychoanalytic theory and was the first to offer a psychological explanation of perversion. He believed perversion to be a part of everyone’s normal constitution (Freud, 1953b [1905]), as well as civilization’s underbelly (Freud, 1961b [1930]). Influenced by Darwin’s evolutionary theory, he held that normal sexuality aims to preserve social norms while ensuring the continuation of the human species. Thus, adult human sexuality engages a suitable object (i.e., an adult of the opposite gender) and aim (i.e., genital intercourse). Perversion, then, is a deviation from this specific object and aim. Because Freud believed infants and young children to be “polymorphous[ly] perverse” – that is, capable of feeling pleasure in a variety of bodily sites and from a variety of objects – he regarded adult perversion as the reemergence of infantile sexuality, which had been repressed by social prohibition and cultural mores. He noted that a critical marker of perversion’s “pathology” could be seen in its degree of exclusiveness and fixity.

Despite his Victorian view of proper sex, Freud (1953b [1905]) did not consider homosexuality a perversion and warned against the pejorative use of the term, highlighting the difficulty with it:

No healthy person, it appears, can fail to make some addition that might be called perverse to the normal sexual aim; and the universality of this finding is in itself enough to show how inappropriate it is to use the word perversion as a term of reproach [emphasis added]. In the sphere of sexual life we are brought up against peculiar and, indeed, insoluble [emphasis added] difficulties as soon as we try to draw a sharp line to distinguish mere variations within the range of what is physiological from pathological symptoms.

(pp. 160–161)

In 1919 Freud extended his view of perversion as libidinally driven, when he wrote of children’s beating fantasies (1955a), and in 1922 (1955d), when he added aggressive impulses to the understanding of perversion. Later (1961c [1927]), Freud introduced trauma to his theory of perversion, citing the fear of castration: the difficulty of reconciling oneself to the difference between the genders and generations was sufficient to create disavowal, a split in the self, and a split with reality. That is, in order to address the trauma caused by the castration threat (female without a penis), men with a perversion create a defensive illusion of a substitute phallus (e.g., shoe) or, alternatively, the phallic (i.e., uncastrated) woman/mother who becomes perfectly symbolized in a fetish, which is then revered as a triumph over the disavowed and unacceptable reality. According to Freud, this defensive mechanism saves the fetishist from becoming homosexual and renders women tolerable sexual objects. Thus, Freud showed how perversions involve defensive and reparative functions.

Freud believed that neurosis is the negative of perversion and thought that neurotics’ symptoms symbolize their sexual lives. That is, neurotic symptoms are formed as an alternative to abnormal sexuality. Conversely, those with perversions cannot symbolize their sexual fantasies and need to act them out in real life. Clearly, Freud’s view grounds perversion in the Oedipal stage of development. Later theorists placed the origin of perversion at the pre-Oedipal stage, with its developmental issues related to separation and mourning. Nonetheless, Freud’s genius shone brightly in his theory of perversion, which, despite its limitations, included many of the components his successors would deem essential to a definition: (a) its universal human dimension, (b) its origin in childhood, (c) its repressive and defensive functions in coping with trauma, (d) its creation of a split in the experience of the self, (e) its creation of an illusion that disavows reality, and (f) its combination of libido with hostility.

Hostility and sadomasochism in perversion

After Freud, Stoller (1974, 1975, 1979, 1985) significantly advanced perversion theory. Specializing in the study of perversion, Stoller noted that “analysts dislike and fear perversion” (1975, p. 53). Like Freud, Stoller argued that separating the perverse from the non-perverse is extremely difficult and that many elements found in perversion are universally present in sexual excitement (1979). Stoller agreed with Freud that perversion originates in childhood, but added to Freud’s theory by explaining how children who undergo humiliation, debasement, and trauma are more likely to develop perversions because they need to reverse and repair the events of their childhood. The script of the perverse fantasy and behavior, said Stoller, includes a hidden agenda of revenge and repair aimed at converting childhood trauma into adult mastery.

This is why Stoller (1974, 1975, 1979, 1985) referred to perversion as the erotic form of hatred, or the wish to harm an object – thus emphasizing perversion’s hostile component. For example, Stoller (1979) described the process of fetishization as follows:

1.The person who is traumatized wishes to enact revenge on the person who did the traumatizing.

2.The traumatizer is stripped of his/her humanity and is dehumanized.

3.A nonhuman object – inanimate, animal, or part-object – is endowed with humanness stolen from the traumatizer.

4.The fetish is chosen because it resembles the loved, needed, traumatizing person.

For Stoller, fetishization is an act of hostility, revenge, dehumanization, and cruelty.

He argued that dehumanization here is a manic mechanism, for which the perverse act is the triumphant solution. In his later writing (1979), Stoller admitted that his theory overemphasized the hostile end of the continuum, ignoring the more tender and loving aspects of perversion; however, he left those to others.

Stoller compared perversion to theater, a mise-en-scène not centered on the partner but on the sexual act itself. Even though the pervert is the actor, writer, and director of the play, its true meaning remains hidden from that person’s view. Stoller believed that crucial to sexual excitement is a sense of mystery, which originates in childhood, during which the difference between the sexes is obscure. Because the perverse script is devised to manage a person’s trauma and to create the greatest excitement, the act involves danger and risk taking. Sometimes, the danger involves the person’s reenactment of the very activity that was originally experienced as traumatic. Yet, the repetition is never exact, since the person with a perversion is now active rather than passive, directing the action and converting pain into pleasure: “Trauma is turned into pleasure, orgasm, victory” (Stoller, 1975, p. 6).

Mervin Glasser (1986) located historical trauma at an even earlier stage of development than did Stoller. In his view, at the center of the psychopathology of those presenting with perversions is a constellation of feelings, attitudes, and ideas, which he called the “core complex,” rooted in early infantile experience. A major element of this complex is a profound longing for union, or even fusion, with another, the fantasy of a blissful state of oneness – a type of “back to the womb” experience – in which the individual is made absolutely secure, and all destructive feelings are contained and made safe. While such longings are found in many loving relationships, in some individuals this fantasy evokes terror and a fear of permanent loss of self or annihilation. If the individual responds to this terror by retreating to a safe distance, he or she risks isolation and exposure. The threat of annihilation evokes aggression, but if the individual were to destroy the exciting stimulus, that person faces an even greater threat of complete object loss. Glasser argued that in perversion the solution to this dilemma is the sexualization of aggression. Aggression, which aims to destroy the source of threat, is thus converted into sadism; the wish to destroy the object is transformed into a desire to hurt and control the object. As in Freud’s account of fetishism, sexualization of intolerable affects preserves what would otherwise preclude an intimate relationship with the object.

Sheldon Bach (1994b) extended an object-relations lens to view the hostility found in many perversions. He agrees with Stoller that those having perversions treat others as things rather than human beings because they lack the capacity to love a whole object: “One might say that a person has a perversion instead of having a relationship” (1994b, p. 5). Perversion uses the erotic act to avoid intimacy, or the closeness of two selves in relationship. Whereas the person not suffering from perversion has respect, warmth, tenderness, acceptance, and love for the other, those with perversion experience cruelty, revenge, humiliation, and hatred in regard to the other, according to Bach. Perversion is more common in men than in women, he asserts, because fetishizing is the norm in men – for example, male pornography does not depict relationships (Bach, 1994b). Therefore, Bach concludes that perversion is a reaction to the failure or miscarriage of love and intimacy and the inability to mourn one’s losses. Indeed, he claims that what the pervert disavows is loss, and he maintains that the loss is not necessarily the absence of the mother’s penis, but the mother herself and the love she gives: “there is no one there to love or be loved by” (1994b, p. 12).

Bach’s (1994a, 1994b) theory of perversion especially highlights sadomasochism and its relation to pain, loss, and Freud’s (1955a [1919]) beating fantasy of being mistreated as a sign of love. Bach asserts that perversion stems from childhood and reveals fixation in the narcissistic, anal-rapprochement phase of development. He believes that sadomasochists choose to suffer and live in pain rather than experience object loss. Sadists, for instance, deny dependence on objects who have failed them in the past. They identify with an idealized version of the mother who gave them pain while at the same time denying their need of her. Bach (1994b) imagines the sadist’s fantasy as: I can do anything I want to you, and you won’t leave me. His script is: If I make you feel as badly as I do, then I know you love me, and we can retrieve our lost togetherness. The sadist experiences sexual satisfaction from recapturing the lost love object and punishing it for straying. Conversely, the masochist’s script is: You can do anything you want to me as long as you don’t leave me. In both cases, the pain of suffering is a defense against the greater pain of loss. Control results in dehumanization and a master/slave relationship. Bach shows how different perverse structures collude with and often need one another, which is why it is naive to assume perversion in relationship is one-sided. More often, the two sides (sadist and masochist) complement each other and form the “perfect” pair, or what Ruth Stein (2008) called the “perverse pact.”

Otto Kernberg (1995) agrees with Stoller and Bach that sadomasochism and hatred exist in perversion due to its mechanization of sex, devaluation of the other’s personality, and failure to integrate aggression with love. He sees in perversion role fixation that reflects a frozen pattern of unconscious, complementary object relationships and coercion masquerading as love. Ruth Stein (2005), too, wrote of perversion as the enactment of a sadomasochistic fantasy that pretends recognition and care for others while it seduces, exploits, and harms them. Perversion is the use of the ends of sexuality as a means to control the other and destroy intimacy when intimacy is experienced as threatening: “Perversion as a mode of relatedness points to relations of seduction, domination, psychic bribery and guileful uses of ‘innocence,’ all in the service of exploiting the other” (2005, pp. 780–781). For Stein, perversion is relational and relationally intentional, a power strategy used to derail the other: “Perversion is a dodging and outwitting of the human need for intimacy, love, for being recognized and excited” (2005, p. 782). It scorns contact with the depth of another, and it uses manipulation, domination, seduction, and psychic bribery to exploit the other.

Reality, illusion, and deception

Many authors follow Freud’s postulation that perversion involves a split with reality resulting in the perverse person’s living out an illusion. The fetishistic illusion, denying castration, is that the woman has a penis. For others, the illusion may involve disavowal, not only of the difference between the sexes, but also of the parents’ intimate relationship (McDougall, 1972), of vitality or deadness (Ogden, 1996), or of one’s hatred that masquerades as love (Stein, 2005). Like Freud, Lacan (1992 [1956–1960], 1994 [1956–1957], 2002 [195...