Embodiment and the Perversion of Desire

Abstract

A contemporary definition of perversion is offered that aims to reveal a form of psychic functioning as a quality of being toward others in the external world, translating to a mode of relating toward internal objects, and/or a mode of relating toward one’s body as an object. This quality of being is contrasted with perversion denoting a specific set of behaviors, as in classical conceptualizations. Two schematics illustrate healthy and perverse phenomenological positions (i.e. identifiable within the person’s preconscious or conscious perspective and experience). These positions highlight ways in which perverse modes of experiencing can be depicted, by use of internal psychic positions and the extent to which these are integrated, interpenetrate one another or are truncated and foreclosed. In particular, a perverse internal psychic mode is proposed where affective, embodied, and pre-reflective self-experience is split off or dissociated. The case of Laura is offered as an illustration of a perverse mode of being and a perverse relationship to her body. I also suggest that perverse modes of relating towards others (primarily through objectification) is more common in males whereas the objectification of one’s body is more common in females.

Keywords:

• Perversion
• desire
• embodiment
• objectification
• sexuality

Notes

1 See Grossman (2015) for an explication of the changes in Freud’s views on sadism and masochism in parallel with the evolution of instinct theory.

2 See, for example, Benjamin’s (1998) notion of the “post-oedipal recuperation of overinclusiveness.”

3 It can be argued that these comprise judgmentalisms or moralisms, i.e., where psychoanalysis prescribes ways to be. Indeed, we do have values and goals for our patients, what defines healthy modalities, and what constitutes liberation from conflict or constraint.

4 In this sense, unbidden refers to “the emergent quality of our experience . . . [the] felt sense of the arrival of experience in my mind, of how little my conscious intentions seem to have to do with the whole process” (Stern 2015, p. 3)

5 Often, in the case of women, the threatening affective experience is associated with desire, appetite (as in eating disorders), or power (see Celenza 2014).

6 Again, these behaviors are selected as examples because of constriction, constraint, and other features of perverse scenarios, not in terms of the manifest behavior itself.

7 Parsons explains these threats from an Object Relations point of view, noting that this theorizing adds “an emphasis on depersonalizing the object but also merging with it . . . what is unbearable is the relationship to a person who has his or her own otherness. The personhood of the other is avoided by turning the person into a thing while the otherness of the other is avoided by the merging.” (Parsons 2000, p. 45, italics in original). I would add to this an important conceptualization of the threatening other (personhood in Parsons’ terms) as a separate and different subject, i.e., center of initiative.

8 The use of the term internal psychic position is utilized here to denote various internal perspectives within the individual that differentiate and characterize the individual’s relation to him/herself and the various perspectives one can take toward oneself, one’s body, or others in the external world. In healthy modes of being, these internal psychic positions flexibly interpenetrate and form the basis upon which the individual experiences him/herself in relation to internal, affective experiencing and in relation to the outside world. This terminology will be further explicated in the body of the paper.

9 Benjamin (2013) comments that the term embodied subjectivity should be redundant; however, it is not, due to the history of mind/body duality in Western philosophical thought.

10 See Grotstein (2000). See also Celenza (2014) for a further elaboration of these positions and other writers on these subjects.