Within psychoanalysis, much has been written about perversion. Ever since Freud’s 1905 work Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, we’ve wondered about child sexuality, and while inclined to attribute sexualization to childhood trauma, we (meaning, psychoanalytic thinkers) still consider that unconscious oedipal and pre-oedipal fantasy remains significant in psychosexual development. Addiction, especially sex addiction, has taken a back seat to perversion in analytic literature, with few even bothering to address the topic of addiction, thinking it derivative, perhaps, of the Freudian lexicon. They may be right. Meanwhile, practitioners and theorists outside of the psychoanalytic tradition dominate the sub-field of sex addiction, which more or less compelled a distracting polemic in mine and Joe Farley’s book, Getting Real About Sex Addiction, published in 2022. In that milieu, which markets to a consumer (patient) base that generally seeks practical, short-term treatment options and is thinly aware of deepening analytic approaches, professionals like me work to tear away from bad objects that have hijacked standards of concept and intervention, acting upon zeitgeist notions of what men owe women, especially.
This is why some of the suggestions that inflect our non-fiction, fitting in between the lines of other narratives, offering readers a glancing view of peripheral matters, might disorient yet give pause—have them consider a reversal. There are comments here and there, footnotes that add density to offhand assertions, especially those that pertain to childhood sexual abuse, perversion—ya know, the mooted etiology of men’s preoccupation with porn, prostitution, or deviant sex. I allude to the intimate relationship between a mother and child, of a mother’s seductiveness, her influence upon psychosexual development. My comments are provocative, if hardly original. Readers looking for attachment history accounts of abusive or neglectful fathers or mothers may nod in recognition of some familiar verbiage, but they may recoil as they read theories that go way beyond what standard attachment theory proponents offer. Take Graeme Taylor’s 2019 article, “Creativity and Perversion: waiting for the muse”: published in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, this paper offers a case illustration of an adult male who presented with depression plus a fetish for giant women, which began as a foot fetish when he was three years old. The man spent time drawing pictures of giant women, which represented a perversion (a “distortion”) of a once observed talent. The patient’s mother had once idealized her son’s artful abilities, but pushed him in his adolescent years in ways that met her narcissistic needs. Pressured to accommodate her, the patient lost his sense of identity, ceasing to draw creatively and pursuing an unrewarding career in book-keeping, seemingly in denial of himself. He disavowed his gift and his sexuality, eschewing sublimation while he acted out a dread of annihilation, turning it into pleasure.
Though he kept drawing, the patient’s depiction of nude or giant women was a part-rebellion, as his mother had been prudish, disapproving of nudes and not allowing him to watch films with scenes of nudity or violence. Jealous mother, we might think. Meanwhile, in his adult life, she was intrusive with her own physicality, kissing him on the lips whenever they met. Further, the patient’s father was a passive man, seemingly unable to take a firm stand with other people, including the patient’s mother. Guilty that he was not utilizing his talent to its fullest extent, the patient was nonetheless stifled, dreading separation from his mother but acting subversively with respect to her wishes for him, the guilt countering the aggression he felt. The giant woman fantasy was a source of comfort for the man, allowing him to deny unacceptable feelings of hate for his mother; indeed, to transform such feelings into sexual excitement. A reversal.
In Getting Real, I reference this kind of reversal, backgrounded as glancing illustrations of emotionally (perhaps physically) incestuous mothers who represent bad internal objects while good internal objects (passive or absent fathers) are missing. In Taylor’s essay, he draws from numerous sources to describe the role of a muse: a traditionally female figure that represents either an equal or an internal good object that facilitates creativity. He disagrees with analysts who believe that the focus of treatment (of perversions) might focus upon the sexual and generally physical inadequacies of the subject. In this Adlerian-sounding formulation, the subject counters feelings of “being small” (and therefore not gratifying the seductive mother) with fantasies of largesse. From the analytic perspective, creativity requires a degree of aggression, which in turn requires an identification with a potent object, or else an introjection of a good-enough mother, as conceptualized by Winnicott. A traumatizing, not-good-enough mother fails to contain her young child’s terror and emotional pain, and the child’s image of her becomes fused with the mother’s rage, plus the oral and anal-sadistic impulses that the child projects onto her. The Medusa-like figure fosters annihilation anxieties which generate helplessness, plus an ongoing struggle to sublimate, but it does not inhibit the split-off rage via acting out behaviors.
Here, the term “acting out behaviors”, so common in sex addiction treatment circles and therefore in Getting Real, replaces the term perversion, more commonly employed by analytic writers, even though the term acting out connotes re-enactment. The terms acting out and perversion are more or less synonymous as they pertain to dynamics that subjects experience with their objects. However, as I wrote previously in “The biggest elephants slip out of sight”, the tendency in SA treatment, besides avoiding terms that suggest “judgement” (as if we couldn’t simply define perversion as distortion) is to assign acting out behaviors to a root-cause of castrating fathers rather than powerful, abusive mothers. More specifically, the tendency is to follow classical psychoanalysis in an unthinking way: blame the abusive (hitting, yelling) father, for that thinking retains the masculine identity of abuse, which is in turn ego-syntonic with populist thought. The shift in analytic thinking, which may not be a shift but rather simply a contextual alternative for flexible thinkers, reflects a Kleinian versus Freudian conception of childhood development wherein the nexus of development is the breast, not the phallus.
In one respect, I envy the likes of Graeme Taylor, or at least that’s what I felt reading his essay. See, as I read his analytic formulation of a fetish-obsessed man, I wondered about the backgrounded figures, like the impacted spouse of his possibly addictive pattern—the shadow consumers, as I have less flatteringly dubbed them. Regarding Taylor, I think, how do you do it? I mean, do you live in a psychoanalytic vacuum, cut off from pop psychology, the pull of the sex addiction zeitgeist? All this stuff about annihilating objects, oral and anal sadistic impulses, and not once do you mention the m word: misogyny. Remarkable. You’re in a different world, mate, assuming you’re not catching flak from circular arguments. See, if you cast a husband as Frankenstein to his wife, then you’re describing misogyny. You cast a wife as Medusa, then you’re describing misogyny. Get it? Okay, maybe Frankenstein is a more sympathetic character, but my point is that demonizing is perceived differentially. The men in my therapy groups, versus those who choose or whom I invite into analysis, live in a world of social justice, of love languages, mindfulness training workshops, not sweating small stuff and working the steps. Upon hearing the Oedipal theory, some would subscribe to the castrating father story (though they’d invariably refer to “abuse”, not castration), as the Kleinian theory is more emasculating. It says that men who suffer from perversions feel dominated by women, and some (though not many) in a group of men would admit to that. They are also less likely to report drawing giant women and masturbating afterwards.
Graeme Daniels Psychewriter 