Why perversion? 'False love' and the perverse pact

Abstract

In this paper, the author works with the awareness that perversion is a socially, historically and theologically loaded term, at the same time as it may be the latest frontier in psychoanalysis, both clinically, and in relation to contemporary art and culture which emphasize the perverse. Positioning itself against tendencies to deny the existence of a category of perversion or, inversely, to abuse it for the power that accrues from the act of diagnosing, she also points to other liabilities in the history of the treatment of this term, such as the narrowing down of perversion to the exclusively sexual domain, or, alternatively, the overextension of it to polymorphously erotic practices that enhance sexual excitement. The paradoxes of perversion and the difficulties of distinguishing the perverse from the non‐perverse are addressed. The case is also made that, in order to understand perversion, one must unlink it from the narrow notion of sexual practice and see what is involved on a deeper level an approach initiated when psychoanalysis turned to perversion as a defense against psychotic anxieties, and began considering the necessary place of perversion in the transference countertransference. Two features common to both sexual and non‐sexual perverse relations are the seductive and bribing aspects of perversion, and its means‐ends reversal. Perversion is a haven for the disguising of hatred and suspicion as excitement and (false) love. Displaced child and beating father, entitled child and seductive mother, are both prototypes of psychoanalytic refiection on parents who excite, deceive and corrupt their children and establish perverse pacts with them. The notion of the perverse pact is foregrounded in Alice's analysis, where first the resurrection and then the dismantling of such a pact were effected through various analytic means.

Key words:

• perversion
• perverse pact
• means‐ends reversal
• ‘false love’
• sexuality

1. An early version of this paper was written at the invitation of the IARPP Online Colloquium Committee, moderated in November 2003 by Tony Bass and Adrienne Har ris, whom I thank for her inspiring input.I am also grateful for the panel s online discussions, and for comments by Glen Gabbard, Jessica Benjamin, Rina Lazar, Gavriel Reisner, and the many readers, anonymous and nonanonymous, of this essay.

1. An early version of this paper was written at the invitation of the IARPP Online Colloquium Committee, moderated in November 2003 by Tony Bass and Adrienne Har ris, whom I thank for her inspiring input.I am also grateful for the panel s online discussions, and for comments by Glen Gabbard, Jessica Benjamin, Rina Lazar, Gavriel Reisner, and the many readers, anonymous and nonanonymous, of this essay.

Notes

1. An early version of this paper was written at the invitation of the IARPP Online Colloquium Committee, moderated in November 2003 by Tony Bass and Adrienne Har ris, whom I thank for her inspiring input.I am also grateful for the panel s online discussions, and for comments by Glen Gabbard, Jessica Benjamin, Rina Lazar, Gavriel Reisner, and the many readers, anonymous and nonanonymous, of this essay.