HOME

TheInfoList



OR:

Perversion is a form of
human behavior Human behavior is the potential and expressed capacity ( mentally, physically, and socially) of human individuals or groups to respond to internal and external stimuli throughout their life. Kagan, Jerome, Marc H. Bornstein, and Richard M. ...
which deviates from what is considered to be orthodox or normal. Although the term ''perversion'' can refer to a variety of forms of deviation, it is most often used to describe
sexual behaviors Human sexual activity, human sexual practice or human sexual behaviour is the manner in which humans experience and express their sexuality. People engage in a variety of sexual acts, ranging from activities done alone (e.g., masturbation) t ...
that are considered particularly abnormal, repulsive or obsessive. Perversion differs from deviant behavior, in that the latter covers areas of behavior (such as petty crime) for which ''perversion'' would be too strong a term. It is often considered derogatory, and, in
psychological Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Psychology includes the study of conscious and unconscious phenomena, including feelings and thoughts. It is an academic discipline of immense scope, crossing the boundaries bet ...
literature, the term '' paraphilia'' has been used as a replacement,Martins, Maria C.; co-author Ceccarelli, Paulo
''The So-called "Deviant" Sexualities: perversion or right to difference?''
Presented in the 16th World Congress. "Sexuality and Human Development: From Discourse to Action." 10–14 March 2003 Havana, Cuba.
though this term is controversial, and ''deviation'' is sometimes used in its place.


History of concept

One view is that the concept of perversion is subjective, and its application varies depending on the individual. Another view considers that perversion is a degradation of an objectively true morality. Originating in the 1660s, a pervert was originally defined as "one who has forsaken a doctrine or system regarded as true, apostate." The sense of a pervert as a sexual term was derived in 1896, and applied originally to variants of sexualities or sexual behavior believed harmful by the individual or group using the term.


Non-sexual usages

The verb ''pervert'' is less narrow in reference than the related nouns, and can be used without any sexual connotations. It is used in English law for the crime of perverting the course of justice which is a common law offence. There is a transition to the sexual in 'the technique of purposeful perversion' of conversational remarks: "Purposeful perversion of what a woman has said ... is a long step closer to a direct attempt at seduction or rape." The noun sometimes occurs in abbreviated
slang Slang is vocabulary (words, phrases, and linguistic usages) of an informal register, common in spoken conversation but avoided in formal writing. It also sometimes refers to the language generally exclusive to the members of particular in-gr ...
form as "perv" and used as a verb meaning "to act like a pervert", and the adjective "pervy" also occurs. All are often, but not exclusively, used non-seriously. In
economics Economics () is the social science that studies the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. Economics focuses on the behaviour and interactions of economic agents and how economies work. Microeconomics anal ...
the term "
perverse incentive A perverse incentive is an incentive that has an unintended and undesirable result that is contrary to the intentions of its designers. The cobra effect is the most direct kind of perverse incentive, typically because the incentive unintentional ...
" means a policy that results in an effect contrary to the policymakers' intention.


Sexual usages


Freud on the role of perversion

Freud Sigmund Freud ( , ; born Sigismund Schlomo Freud; 6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939) was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for evaluating and treating pathologies explained as originating in conflicts i ...
's didactic strategy in his '' Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality'' was to construct a bridge between the "perversions" and "normal" sexuality. Clinically exploring "a richly diversified collection of erotic endowments and inclinations: hermaphroditism, pedophilia,
sodomy Sodomy () or buggery (British English) is generally anal or oral sex between people, or sexual activity between a person and a non-human animal ( bestiality), but it may also mean any non- procreative sexual activity. Originally, the term ''s ...
,
fetishism A fetish (derived from the French , which comes from the Portuguese , and this in turn from Latin , 'artificial' and , 'to make') is an object believed to have supernatural powers, or in particular, a human-made object that has power over o ...
,
exhibitionism Exhibitionism is the act of exposing in a public or semi-public context one's intimate parts – for example, the breasts, Sex organ, genitals or buttocks. The practice may arise from a desire or compulsion to expose themselves in such a mann ...
,
sadism Sadism may refer to: * Sadomasochism, the giving or receiving of pleasure from acts involving the receipt or infliction of pain or humiliation * Sadistic personality disorder, an obsolete term proposed for individuals who derive pleasure from the s ...
,
masochism Sadomasochism ( ) is the giving and receiving of pleasure from acts involving the receipt or infliction of pain or humiliation. Practitioners of sadomasochism may seek sexual pleasure from their acts. While the terms sadist and masochist refer ...
, coprophilia,
necrophilia Necrophilia, also known as necrophilism, necrolagnia, necrocoitus, necrochlesis, and thanatophilia, is sexual attraction towards or a sexual act involving corpses. It is classified as a paraphilia by the World Health Organization (WHO) in its ...
" among them, Freud concluded that "all humans are innately perverse". He found the roots of such perversions in infantile sexuality—in 'the child's "polymorphously perverse" inclinations ... the "aptitude" for such perversity is innate'. The 'crucial irony of Freud's account in the ''Three Essays'' was that perversion in childhood ''was'' the norm'. Refining his analysis a decade later, Freud stressed that while
childhood sexuality Development of sexuality is an integral part of the development and maturation of children. It includes a range of sensory, emotional, and consequent sexual activities that may occur before or during early puberty, but before full sexual maturity ...
involved a wide and unfocused range of perverse activities, by contrast with adult perversion there was 'an important difference between them. Perverse sexuality is as a rule excellently centred: all its activities are directed to an aim—usually a single one; one component instinct has gained the upper hand...In that respect there is no difference between perverse and normal sexuality other than the fact that their dominating component instincts and consequently their sexual aims are different. In both of them, one might say, a well-organized tyranny has been established, but in each of the two a different family has seized the reins of power'. A few years later, in "A Child is Being Beaten" (1919), Freud laid greater stress on the fact that perversions "go through a process of development, that they represent an end-product and not an initial manifestation ... that the sexual aberrations of childhood, as well as those of mature life, are ramifications of the same complex"—the
Oedipus complex The Oedipus complex (also spelled Œdipus complex) is an idea in psychoanalytic theory. The complex is an ostensibly universal phase in the life of a young boy in which, to try to immediately satisfy basic desires, he unconsciously wishes to h ...
.
Otto Fenichel Otto Fenichel (2 December 1897 in Vienna – 22 January 1946 in Los Angeles) was a psychoanalyst of the so-called "second generation". Education and psychoanalytic affiliations Otto Fenichel started studying medicine in 1915 in Vienna. Already ...
took up the point about the defensive function of perversions—of "experiences of sexual satisfactions which simultaneously gave a feeling of security by denying or contradicting some fear"; adding that while "some people think that perverts are enjoying some kind of more intense sexual pleasure than normal people. This is not true ... houghneurotics, who have repressed perverse longings, may envy the perverts who express the perverse longings openly".


Arlene Richards on the role of perversion in women

Freud wrote extensively on perversion in men. However, he and his successors paid scant attention to perversion in women. In 2003, psychologist, psychoanalyst and feminist
Arlene Kramer Richards Arlene Kramer Richards (born June 1935) is a practicing psychoanalyst and author based in New York, New York. She has written seven children books and papers on female sexuality, perversion and gambling. Career Kramer Richards is a training an ...
published a seminal paper on female perversion, "A Fresh look at Perversion", in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. In 2015, psychoanalyst Lynn Friedman, in a review of The Complete Works of Arlene Richards in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, noted prior to that time, "virtually no analysts were writing about female perversion. This pioneering work undoubtedly paved the way for others, including Louise Kaplan (1991), to explore this relatively uncharted territory."


The permissive society

With the
sexual revolution The sexual revolution, also known as the sexual liberation, was a social movement that challenged traditional codes of behavior related to sexuality and interpersonal relationships throughout the United States and the developed world from the 1 ...
of the later twentieth century, much that Freud had argued for became part of a new wide-ranging liberal consensus. At times this might lead to a kind of
Panglossian Optimism is an attitude reflecting a belief or hope that the outcome of some specific endeavor, or outcomes in general, will be positive, favorable, and desirable. A common idiom used to illustrate optimism versus pessimism is a glass filled ...
world view where every fetishist has his "fetishera ... for every man who is hung up on shoes, there is a woman ready to cater for and groove with him, and for every man who gets his thrills from hair, there is a woman who gets hers from having her locks raped. Havelock Ellis has many cases of this meeting of the minds: the man who yearns to get pressed on by high heels sooner or later meets the woman who has daydreamed all her life of heel-pressing". Where internal controversy did arise in the liberal consensus was about the exact relation of variations to normal development—some considering in the wake of Freud that "these different sexual orientations can best be explained and understood by comparison with normal development", and highlighting the
fear of intimacy Fear of intimacy is generally a social phobia and anxiety disorder resulting in difficulty forming close relationships with another person. The term can also refer to a scale on a psychometric test, or a type of adult in attachment theory ...
in perversion as "a kind of sex ... which is hedged about with special conditions ... puts ''a vast distance'' between the partners". From such a standpoint, "whatever the deviant impulse or fantasy may be, that's where the real, true, loving sexuality is hidden"—a point of transition perhaps to some of the bleaker post-permissive visions of perversion.


Critical views

For some participants, "Liberation, at least in its sexual form, was a new kind of imposed morality, quite as restricting" as what had gone before—one that "took very little account of the complexity of human emotional connections". New, more sceptical currents of disenchantment with perversion emerged as a result (alongside more traditional condemnations) in both the French-speaking and English-speaking worlds. Lacan had early highlighted "the ambivalence proper to the 'partial drives' of scoptophilia,
sadomasochism Sadomasochism ( ) is the giving and receiving of pleasure from acts involving the receipt or infliction of pain or humiliation. Practitioners of sadomasochism may seek sexual pleasure from their acts. While the terms sadist and masochist refe ...
... the often very little 'realised' aspect of the apprehension of others in the practice of certain of these perversions". In his wake, others would stress how "there is always, in any perverse act, an aspect of rape, in the sense that the Other must find himself drawn into the experience despite himself ... a loss or abandonment of subjectivity." Similarly,
object relations theory Object relations theory is a school of thought in psychoanalytic theory centered around theories of stages of ego development. Its concerns include the relation of the psyche to others in childhood and the exploration of relationships between ...
would point to the way "in perversion there is the refusal, the terror of strangeness"; to the way "the 'pervert' ... attacks imaginative elaboration through compulsive action with an accomplice; and this is done to mask psychic pain". Empirical studies would find "in the perverse relationships described...an absolute absence of any shared pleasures"; while at the theoretical level "perversions involve—the theory tells us—an attempted denial of the difference between the sexes and the generations", and include "the wish to damage and dehumanize ... the misery of the driven, damaging life".Phillips, ''On Flirtation'' p. 108, Raymond Harris, III The Pervert.


See also

*
David Morgan (psychologist) David Howell Morgan (BAHons Msc.Clin.Psych. FBPAS FPBPA SMBPF. Training Analyst Supervisor IPA. AMBPS. MBPC) is a psychoanalyst and consultant psychotherapist who has worked at the Portman Clinic London and Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust for 25 ...
*
Fixed fantasy A fixed fantasy – also known as a "dysfunctional schema" – is a belief or system of beliefs held by a single individual to be genuine, but that cannot be verified in reality. The term is typically applied to individuals suffering from some type ...
*
Hentai Hentai is anime and manga pornography. A loanword from Japanese, the original term ( ) does not describe a genre of media, but rather an abnormal sexual desire or act, as an abbreviation of . In addition to anime and manga, hentai works exi ...
*
Kink (sexual) In human sexuality, kinkiness is the use of non- conventional sexual practices, concepts or fantasies. The term derives from the idea of a "bend" (cf. a "kink") in one's sexual behaviour, to contrast such behaviour with "straight" or "vanilla" sex ...
*
Lascivious behavior Lascivious behavior is sexual behavior or conduct that is considered crude and offensive, or contrary to local moral or other standards of appropriate behavior. In this sense "lascivious" is similar in meaning to "lewd", "indecent", "lecherous", ...
* Richard von Krafft-Ebing *
Robert J. Stoller Robert Jesse Stoller (December 15, 1924 – September 6, 1991), was an American Professor of Psychiatry at UCLA Medical School and a researcher at the UCLA Gender Identity Clinic. He was born in Crestwood, New York, and died in Los Angeles, Ca ...
* Voyeurism


References

{{Reflist


Further reading

* Robert J. Stoller, ''Sweet Dreams, Erotic Plots'' (2009) * Morgan, David and Ruszczynski, Stan, ''Lectures on Violence, Perversion and Delinquency. The Portman Papers Series'' (2007)


External links


Joyce McDougall "Perversion"

Sexual Perversion and Treatment
da:Perversion