PSYCHOANALYSIS AND SEXUAL DISORDERS: PERVERSIONS
The range of maladaptive behaviors of particular interest to psychoanalysts has been that of the perversions. The perversions are forms of sexual dysfunction which include such behaviors as homosexuality, fetishism, transvestitism, exhibitionism, voyeurism, and sadomasochism. A perversion may be regarded as a form of sexual disturbance in which sexual gratification can be gained from sexual aims that are fixated at one or other level of infantile sexual development. In the perversions normal adult sexual outlets and sources of satisfaction are not expressed normally but are replaced by more infantile forms of sexual expression. Thus, the perversions are forms of infantile rather than of adult sexuality.
Thus, if we look at fetishism for a moment, the fetishist tends to cathect libidinally an inanimate object that has come to symbolize a part of the body of an ambivalently loved person. Fetishism is consequently a mental state that leads the person to worship or love such a material object which he takes as possessing a magical power or as having a special neurotic interest. This is the fixation of neurotic investment on an object or body part that is inappropriate to normal sexual purposes but is required by the person for the attainment of sexual gratification. Parts of the body such as hair, hands or feet, or even a shoe or handkerchief or other object of personal apparel can serve such purposes. The fetish itself usually is taken to symbolize the female phallus, and its use represents the denial of the danger of castration that might be suggested by the anatomical differences between the sexes. The mind of the fetishist therefore is split; part of his mind is able to assess and accept the absence of the penis in the female, but another part unconsciously adheres to and insists on the idea that the female does, in fact, possess a phallus. Fetishism can be viewed as one deviant resolution of the problem of castration anxiety.
Similarly, the transvestite finds pleasure in dressing in the garments of the opposite sex. For the male this may represent an identification with the phallic mother, and for the female it may serve her wish to deny the lack of a penis. Similarly, the often compulsive exposure of sex organs in exhibitionism may be a defense against castration anxiety because of the shock or fright in the female object at the sight of a penis. Conversely, voyeurism may serve similar defense needs. Sadomasochism early in Freud’s thinking was regarded as a partial instinct representing a tendency to seek or inflict physical or mental suffering as a way of achieving sexual arousal or gratification. In masochistic perversion, sexual gratification, even orgasm, is felt as a result of inflicted pain by such practices as beatings, threats, humiliations, or subjugations at the hand of a sexual partner. Similarly, sadistic gratification is derived from inflicting such torment on the sexual partner.
The organization of the perversions may come about either through arrested or fixated development or through a regression from more developed forms of sexual expression. The perversions that come from regression are not typical and tend to substitute aspects of sexual forepleasure for the mature sexual act. Such individuals generally tend to have a more infantile caste to their personality organization in general. The major part of the sexual energies of individuals with perversions is concentrated on one particular partial instinct, so that the dominant role of this partial instinct competes with the individual’s genital primacy. These individuals are capable of orgastic release, but the orgasm is usually stimulated by the perverse act rather than by normal heterosexual outlet. The capacity for genital orgasm is inhibited by an obstacle that is overcome or circumvented in the perverse act. Such perverse behavior and sexual expression does not lack organization as is often seen in the sexuality of “polymorphous perverse” children or regressed infantile personalities; rather, it is organized under the primacy of a component instinct whose gratification makes genital orgasm possible in a way that could not otherwise be achieved.
A critical question, then, is what factors inhibit the normal developmental progression to genital primacy. The psychoanalytic answer leans heavily toward the genesis of anxiety and guilt feelings related to the child’s oedipal involvement with his parents. The beginnings of genital primacy are established in the phallic phase (in about the third year when genital drives begin to emerge and the differences between the sexes, especially genital differences, become significant) in which the oedipal complex arises. The oedipal complex or situation refers to the complex emotional involvement in relation to both parents as a result of normal sexual development. In his earlier pre-oedipal years, the child is involved with each parent, mother and father, in separate and different ways. By the third year, he attained a new and more complex level of involvement with the parents. The child must relate to them together as a pair, no longer separately and singly in one-to-one interactions, but now as a member of a triad in which the child is the third, the smallest and most dependent member. This step is important because it is the child’s first experience of social interaction, and it sets a decisive pattern for later interactions. This particularly pertains to the experience of himself as a sexual being.
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