Perversion

The Erotic Form of Hatred

Robert J. Stoller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429917219
• Topic: Psicologia
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della psicologia

This book focuses on the subject of the development of masculinity and femininity. It shows that the perverse scene aims not only at denying castration, but also at securing a more solid basis for a jeopardized sexual identity.

Part I

Definition

Chapter 1

Definitions

Let me say what I think an aberration, a variant, and a perversion are and in later chapters review data and concepts that led to the definitions. I believe that perversion does exist; that its harsh connotations reflect a dim awareness that at the core of the perverse act is desire to harm others; and that the concept should be retained, not because it is a useful propaganda weapon for preserving society, but because the condition is demonstrable.

By aberration here I mean an erotic technique or constellation of techniques that one uses as his complete sexual act and that differs from his culture’s traditional, avowed definition of normality. Sexual aberrations can be divided into two classes: variants (deviations) and perversions.

By variant I mean an aberration that is not primarily the staging of forbidden fantasies, especially fantasies of harming others. Examples would be behavior set off only by abnormal brain activity, as with a tumor, experimental drug, or electrical impulse from an implanted electrode; or an aberrant act one is driven to faute de mieux; or sexual experiments one does from curiosity and finds not exciting enough to repeat.

Perversion, the erotic form of hatred, is a fantasy, usually acted out but occasionally restricted to a daydream (either self-produced or packaged by others, that is, pornography). It is a habitual, preferred aberration necessary for one’s full satisfaction, primarily motivated by hostility. By “hostility” I mean a state in which one wishes to harm an object; that differentiates it from “aggression,” which often implies only forcefulness. The hostility in perversion takes form in a fantasy of revenge hidden in the actions that make up the perversion and serves to convert childhood trauma to adult triumph. To create the greatest excitement, the perversion must also portray itself as an act of risk-taking.

While these definitions remove former incongruities, they impose on us the new burden of learning from a person what motivates him. But we are freed from a process of designation that did not take the subject’s personality and motivation into account. We no longer need to define a perversion according to the anatomy used, the object chosen, the society’s stated morality, or the number of people who do it. All we need know is what it means to the person doing it; while this may be difficult for us to uncover, there is still no a priori reason to reject this technique for defining.

Analysts (and others) have used terms like “aberration,” “deviation,” or “perversion” as synonyms and classified an act as such according to the observer’s, not necessarily the participant’s, criteria. Then, when a theory of perversion has been established—preoedipal and oedipal conflict; oral, anal, or phallic fixation and regression; fantasies of threatening objects, such as father’s bad introjected penis or mother’s worse breast; splitting of the ego; attack or permission by a flawed superego; or whatever—the explanation is complete before one ever sees the patient. To avoid such efficiency, I am trying to force us back for information upon the actual person doing the act. By now it is notorious that the foregoing systems have been offered as explanations for every sort of behavior, which of course means they explain little; with all their strength in describing dynamics, these concepts cannot answer how perversion differs from, say, a tic, a hallucination, mania, or a craving for pickles.

For instance, it is suggested that the perverse act provides gratification because, among other listed “specific indicators of perversion,”

through it [the act] he [the prototypical patient] acted out a confrontation of idealized and degraded images of his mother … it gratified sadistic and masochistic wishes that were otherwise unacceptable … castration anxiety and guilt—which he would ordinarily experience in the sexual relation—were successfully warded off by the perverse defensive system … the perversion acted out a forbidden wish in disguised form—specifically, both the oedipal wish and the homosexual transference … it reenacted the primal scene … it also reenacted childhood seduction and gratification by the parents … it permitted actual gratification by an actual substitute object, so that the anxiety of object loss was allayed…. (114, p. 47)*

We may be allowed a sense of déjà vu.

Within the usual psychoanalytic framework we assume that all sexual aberrations are energized by pathological dynamics and treat our patients—and create theory—accordingly. Then, because we use these psychoanalytic concepts to imply disturbance, we find ourselves using that paragon, “the heterosexual,” or, even vaguer, “the normal,” as the base line for measuring the pathology of those less blessed. Having done that, however, we are driven to the deceit of ignoring our knowledge of the ubiquitous malfunctioning of “the heterosexual” or our failure to find or describe “the normal.”

I prefer definitions anchored in clinical data rather than in theory, and so shall now set out several suggestions and hypotheses, based on observation, that will help elaborate these definitions.

First, when we use the word “sexual” in “sexual aberrations,” we should restrict it to conscious erotic excitement and avoid the larger psychoanalytic meanings, which call all pleasure “sexual”; this latter use has value in certain contexts but would only muddle us here. For instance, a gender identity disorder, such as effeminacy, is present most of the time independent of sexual excitement; it may be found in both perverse and nonperverse men.

Second, whether an aberration is a variant or a perversion is determined by one’s attitude toward the object of one’s excitement. If one’s choice of this object—man, woman, dog, part of the body, inanimate thing, whatever—is motivated by the desire to harm the object and is sensed as an act of revenge, then the act is perverse.

Third, every time the perverse act is performed with others or privately in masturbation, a triumph is celebrated.

Fourth, the trauma of childhood mentioned in the definition actually occurred and is memorialized in the details of the perversion. My hypothesis is that a perversion is the reliving of actual historical sexual trauma aimed precisely at one’s sex (an anatomical state) or gender identity (masculinity or femininity),* and that in the perverse act the past is rubbed out. This time, trauma is turned into pleasure, orgasm, victory. But the need to do it again—unendingly, eternally again in the same manner—comes from one’s inability to get completely rid of the danger, the trauma. It happened; and, except at the moment when the act of perversion has progressed smoothly, one cannot make out to oneself, even though the memory is unconscious, that it did not happen. We do not need a steamy construct like “repetition compulsion” to explain the repeating; in perversion, one repeats because repeating now means that one will escape the old trauma and because revenge and orgasm deserve repeating. Those are reasons enough.

From Freud on, it has been said that precocious excitement contributes to perversion. I would agree, but only—as must usually be the case—when there has been too much stimulation and too little discharge or severe guilt. These will then be sensed as traumatic and will need to be transformed via the magic of the perverse ritual into a successful venture. With much gratification and little guilt at too young an age, on the other hand, I think the result is not perversion but aberration, a holding on, into adult life, to that deviant way of getting pleasure, which is not driven, as is perversion, by the need to harm an object.

Fifth, one has to ensure, over the years of trial and error in constructing fantasies, that one finally arrives at a rendering—the adult perversion—that works smoothly. One’s failure in construction is marked on one side by lack of sexual interest—boredom—and on the other by anxiety. Both are manifested in disturbed potency. If the daydream is to work, the story must not arouse too much anxiety, which in unadulterated form is the enemy of pleasure. But one must reduce anxiety without also ending excitement. This is done by introducing a sense of risk into the story. A sense of risk; in reality, the risk cannot be great or anxiety will arise. One can only have the impression of risk.

This requires a few words now and in case material later. There are sexual acts in which gross risk-taking is essential: for instance, hanging oneself to achieve orgasm. What we must distinguish, however, is that the risk buried among the fantasies of the sexual act is not the same as that which threatens in the real world; the risk from the noose—death—is not the risk—anxiety or guilt—that fantasy must avoid.

Sixth, the result of all this work of constructing the fantasy we know as the perversion is that one’s sex objects are dehumanized. This is obvious in, say, fetishism or necrophilia. But look closely at cryptoperversions such as rape, or a preference for prostitutes, or compulsive promiscuity (Don Juanism or nymphomania), which the naïve observer may see only as heterosexual enthusiasms: in fact the object is a person with a personality, while the perverse person sees a creature without humanity—just an anatomy or clichéd fragments of personality (for example, “what a piece of ass,” “all men are brutes”). This is hardly a new idea. In 1930, E. Straus noted: “The delight in perversions is caused by … the destruction, humiliation, desecration, the deformation of the perverse individual himself and of his partner” (Straus’s italics).*

But these propositions do not tell how pleasure is introduced. If perversion is the result of threat and the resultant hatred, whence comes pleasure? Unmitigated trauma or frustration has no lust in it, nor does rage. Pleasure is released only when fantasy—that which makes perversion uniquely human—has worked. With fantasy, trauma is undone, and in the daydream—the manifest content, the conscious, constructed story line of fantasy—it can be undone, over and over as necessary.

In redoing the world, daydreams contribute to pleasure first by ridding one of fear of the trauma being repeated. Second, the daydream has in it elements that simulate risk, so that excitement—tension—is introduced. Third, the daydream guarantees a happy ending, saying that this time one has not only surmounted the trauma but even thwarted if not traumatized those who were the original attackers. Finally, when the daydream becomes attached to genital excitement and especially to orgasm, the “rightness” of the daydream is reinforced and the person motivated to repeat the experience under like circumstances.

Another problem: if perversion is erotized hatred, why (except for homosexuality) is perversion found more in males? If it is erotized hatred, then we will have to find hatred more—or in different form—in men than in women. This may be so. We shall study it further (chap. 8).

In order to begin to judge these ideas, draw on your own experience. Think of perversions with which you are familiar: necrophilia, fetishism, rape, sex murder, sadism, masochism, voyeurism, pedophilia—and many more. In each is found—in gross form or hidden but essential in the fantasy—hostility, revenge, triumph, and a dehumanized object. Before even scratching the surface, we can see that someone harming someone else is a main feature in most of these conditions. Later on we shall test these ideas harder by looking at conditions in which this mechanism is less manifest; we shall find that it still takes little clinical skill—or theory-making—to find the hostility mechanism. We shall also see the perverse act thread its way between anxiety and boredom in a search for the right sort of risk to create excitement.

It is too bad that my attempt to define fails to extricate us from an old problem: I cannot state how much perversion is needed before we can diagnose the condition as a perversion (just as there is no precise measure in, say, anxiety neurosis for the amount of anxiety that must be present, and no precise point at which character structure becomes character disorder). The demand is an artificial one, however; diagnosis in medicine is no more than a convenience, an effort to convey as much information as possible in the fewest words about the clinical features, underlying pathodynamics, and etiology. Those of us who are psychiatrists all went to medical school, so we long for a diagnostic system that will communicate as well as that which covers most of the disorders other physicians study. And if the psychiatrist is like the sex researchers in that he does not believe there are psychic states that originate in conflict and are maintained by mental mechanisms like fantasy, repression, undoing, and splitting, he will keep pressing for psychiatric diagnoses that are as tidy as, say, “compound comminuted fracture of the femur,” “appendicitis,” or “rabies.”

It does not work. Our classification uses too many different methods to arrive at a diagnosis. In other words, the rationales for making a diagnosis slip and slide from category to category, revealing that makeshift convenience, more than logic or data, controls the arrangement. Without effort I can think of a number of unrelated ways currently used for diagnosing, and you can easily add more.

1. diagnosis as it is employed in the rest of medicine; examples are “autosomal trisomy of group g” or “psychosis with brain trauma.”

2. a syndrome; an example is the label “schizophrenia,” which most of us feel is actually a group of conditions with different etiologies, courses, and prognoses.

3. an outstanding symptom (regardless of the underlying character structure and the other neurotic symptoms also present); examples are “anxiety neurosis” or “phobic neurosis.”

4. an outstanding sign (ditto 3); examples are “homosexuality” or “fetishism.”

5. a single symptom; examples are “tic” or “speech disturbance.”

6. a single sign; examples are “enuresis” or “encopresis.”

7. a chronic way of life; examples are “paranoid personality” or “inadequate personality.”

8. body-organ pathology due in part to mental states; an example is “psychophysiologic skin disorder.”

9. drug dependence; examples are “alcohol addiction” or “drug dependence, heroin.”

10. potpourri; examples are “social maladjustment” or “marital maladjustment.”

This is a system?

If the diagnosis in most cases gives only the illusion of exactness, it will be safer for us to make do with simple descriptions that summarize the observable; we can manage that way right now, and we will not be forced to do the impossible—to measure if someone is perverse enough to be labeled as having a perversion. Our work will not suffer; we will still be able to make our usual wise or foolish decisions about, say, treatment or criminality.

The definitions outlined here need extended discussion; but before looking more closely at the differences between “variant” and “perversion,” I want to consider recent sex research against the background of traditional psychoanalytic findings and theory that have dominated ideas about sexual behavior for several generations.

* Full citations of publications quoted or referred to in this book may be found in the list of References on pages 221–231. Numbers in parentheses refer to numbered items on this list.

* Valenstein says the trauma may not have been experienced literally but may have been an “experiential misconception” of a real event (114, p. 9).

* E. Straus, Geschehnis und Erlebnis (Berlin, 1930), p. 113. Quoted in 7, p. 20.

Chapter 2

Impact of New Advances in Sex Research on Psychoanalytic Theory

Psychoanalytic theory is Freud’s creation; most modifications introduced by others have not only been minor but are elaborations of theoretical positions he had already explicitly introduced. Therefore this chapter will examine the sexual theories of Freud alone. While one cannot usually discuss any sector of his work without remembering how it changed as the years passed, this is less true for his sexual theories.

Reviewing these theories, one recognizes that Freud did not clarify what he meant by “sexuality,” and so at time...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: Definition
• Part II: Dynamics: Trauma, Hostility, Risk, and Revenge
• Part III: Social Issues
• References
• Index