What are Perversions? PDF Download

Author: Sergio Benvenuto
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429923783
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 243

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Book Description
This book explores what we mean when we use the term "perversion." Are we dealing with a sexological classification, a mental disturbance, an ethical deviation, a hedonistic style, or an historical-cultural artifact? The book retraces some of the fundamental stages in the field of psychoanalytic thought-from Freud to Masud Khan, Stoller, and Lacan-and proposes an original approach: that "paraphilias" today are taken as an ethical failure of the sexual relationship with the other. The perversions signal a specific relationship with the other, who is treated not simply as a sexual object, but someone whose subjectivity is ably exploited precisely in order to get a perverse pleasure. Acts, if considered perverse, are understood as a metaphorical re-edition of a trauma, above all sexual, in which the subject (as a child) suffered the bitter experience of exclusion or jealousy.

Author: Sheldon Bach
Publisher: Jason Aronson
ISBN: 9780765702302
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
From long before the Trojan War to the ethnic cleansings of our own century, people have often used their potential to treat other human beings as things. It is this treatment of another person as a thing rather than as a human being that the eminent psychoanalyst, Dr. Sheldon Bach, sees as a perversion of object relationships and that forms the background of this powerful book. Perversion is a lack of capacity for whole object love, and while this includes the sexual perversions it also includes certain character perversions, character disorders and psychotic conditions. Dr. Bach's clinical work has led him to conclude that sexual perversions are generally inconsistent with whole object love. Therapeutic experience suggests that the pathways to object love may be strewn with outgrown and discarded sexual perversions. But whether a sexual perversion per se exists or not, the issue of how it happens that one person can degrade another to the status of a thing is an issue of importance not only for the psychoanalysis of character but for our larger understanding of human nature as well. Perversions are attempts to simplistically resolve or defend against some of the central paradoxes of human existence. How is it possible for us to be born of someone's flesh yet be separate from them, or to live in one's own experience yet observe oneself from the outside? How are we able to deal with feelings of being both male and female, child and adult, or to negotiate between the worlds of internal and external stimulation? People with perversions have special difficulty in dealing with the ambiguity of human relationships. They have not developed the transitional psychic space that would allow them to contain paradox, making it difficult for them to recognize the reality and legitimacy of multiple points of view. Thus they tend to think in either/or dichotomies, to search for dominant/submissive relationships and to perceive the world from idiosyncratically subjective or coldly objective perspectives. In this

Author: Stephanie S. Swales
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113632996X
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
Lacan's psychoanalytic take on what makes a pervert perverse is not the fact of habitually engaging in specific "abnormal" or transgressive sexual acts, but of occupying a particular structural position in relation to the Other. Perversion is one of Lacan's three main ontological diagnostic structures, structures that indicate fundamentally different ways of solving the problems of alienation, separation from the primary caregiver, and castration, or having limits set by the law on one's jouissance. The perverse subject has undergone alienation but disavowed castration, suffering from excessive jouissance and a core belief that the law and social norms are fraudulent at worst and weak at best. In Perversion, Stephanie Swales provides a close reading (a qualitative hermeneutic reading) of what Lacan said about perversion and its substructures (i.e., fetishism, voyeurism, exhibitionism, sadism, and masochism). Lacanian theory is carefully explained in accessible language, and perversion is elucidated in terms of its etiology, characteristics, symptoms, and fundamental fantasy. Referring to sex offenders as a sample, she offers clinicians a guide to making differential diagnoses between psychotic, neurotic, and perverse patients, and provides a treatment model for working with perversion versus neurosis. Two detailed qualitative clinical case studies are presented—one of a neurotic sex offender and the other of a perverse sex offender—highlighting crucial differences in the transference relation and subsequent treatment recommendations for both forensic and private practice contexts. Perversion offers a fresh psychoanalytic approach to the subject and will be of great interest to scholars and clinicians in the fields of psychoanalysis, psychology, forensic science, cultural studies, and philosophy.

Author: Louise J. Kaplan
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
ISBN: 9780765700865
Category : Bovary, Emma (Fictitious character)
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Louise J. Kaplan challenges the traditional view that perversion represents deviant sexual behavior in this "fascinating and ambitious new study".--The New York Times Book Review. "This masterful study breaks new ground in our understanding of sexuality, gender roles and the way modern society trivializes erotic expression".--Publishers Weekly.

Author: Danielle Knafo
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131752926X
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 358

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Book Description
American Board and 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.

Author: Robert J. Stoller
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 042991721X
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description
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.

Author: Arnold Goldberg
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300105353
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
Perverse sexual behavior--from mild variations on heterosexual activity to fetishism to cross-dressing--is usually linked to sexual and/or aggressive conflicts in childhood. In this book, Dr. Arnold Goldberg explains and interprets perverse behavior in a different way, by drawing on concepts of psychoanalytic self psychology, a variant of psychoanalysis that originated with Dr. Heinz Kohut and that concentrates on the self as a psychological structure. Psychoanalytic self psychology, says Dr. Goldberg, makes disorders of perversion more understandable and more accessible to treatment. Dr. Goldberg expands the definition of perversion, claiming that it is based on three essential components: sexualization (as distinct from sexuality); vertical splitting (where perverse action resides in the split-off part of the self and the other sector of the self, which knows right from wrong, is temporarily stilled); and psychological family dynamics. Dr. Goldberg explains each of these three dimensions and provides a number of illustrations. He also discusses the possibility of interpreting homosexuality as a compensatory structure, the relation of hostility to perversion, types of perverse behavior that are readily treatable, and the reasonable goals of such treatment.

Author: James Penney
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0791481670
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
In The World of Perversion, James Penney argues that antihomophobic criticism has nothing to lose—and indeed everything to gain—by reclaiming the psychoanalytic concept of perversion as psychic structure. Analyzing the antagonism between psychoanalytic approaches to perversion and those inspired by the work of Michel Foucault, Penney explores how different assumptions about sexuality have determined the development of contemporary queer theory, and how the universalizing approach to homosexuality in psychoanalysis actually leads to more useful political strategies for nonheterosexual subjects. Having established this theoretical context, Penney focuses on works by Georges Bataille, Blaise Pascal, Denis Diderot, and Jacques Lacan, tracing the implications of various sexual and moral understandings of the term perversion, and illustrating how a psychoanalytic approach to the question of perversion enables politicized readings that are foreclosed by a Foucauldian methodology.

Author: Prof. Lisa Downing
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429917236
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 380

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Book Description
Perversion - its ubiquity in infantile life and its persistence in the psychical and sexual lives of some adults - was a central element of Freud's lifelong work. The problem of perversion has since been revisited by many psychoanalytic schools with the result that Freud's original view of perversion has been replaced by numerous - often contradictory - perspectives on its aetiology, development and treatment. The concept of perversion has also been significant for the disciplines of cultural studies and gender and queer theory, which have explored the creative and dissident powers of perversion, while expressing a suspicion of its operation as a pathological category. This bi-partite collection offers a series of perspectives on perversion by a range of psychoanalytic practitioners and theorists (edited by Dany Nobus), and a selection of papers by scholars who work with, or critique, psychoanalytic theories of perversion (edited by Lisa Downing). It stages a serious dialogue between psychoanalysis and its commentators on the controversial issue of non-normative sexuality.

Author: Masud Khan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429910681
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
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.