Perversion Is Us

"It is a set of notes, excerpts from clinical reports of my own, literary essays, psychoanalytic theory, notes accompanied by commentary, free association, developed thoughts, fragments of theory - a form that will mirror and predict my topic" (826)"Anxiety, Harry Stack Sullivan is said to have said, is like a blow on the head - it stops you from thinking. To write a coherent essay, you have to think in a straight line. To write notes, you jig and jog, zig along until you meet anxiety and then zag away in another direction, hoping to come back to that anxious spot from another angle, sparking this thought here and that feeling there and that idea way over there, hoping that this little bit of fireworks will end in a pattern of power and significance" (826)"however empathically the pervert patient is comprehended, the pervert is still the other guy doing alien and even disgusting albeit (or therefore) fascinating things. Perversion may be defined, after all, as the sex that you like and I don't" (827)"Maybe, as the stigma lifts from one marginal sexual practice, it doesn't disappear but alights on another... Stigma lurks" (827) this reminds me of Gayle Rubin's "Charmed Circle""At the same time, Stoller contended, perversion, by soaking up the anxiety and aggression brought on by oedipal rigors, safeguards heterosexuality and, therefore, the species" (828)"A moment of anxiety. Don't mention children and perversion in the same breath" (828)"to pathologize is simultaneously to identify the illness that needs cure and to stigmatize the badness that causes shame... the power to name and the power to shame" (829)"purity, if we recall that the Latin sanitas means "cleanliness"" (830)"The pervert wishes to obliterate the distinctions on which psychic structures and social orders depend. The pervert makes a double erosion, of the difference between the sexes and of that between the generations... Disorder is created, and, as borders are violated, pollution prevails" (830)"Benjamin's (1998) proposal that recognition of that other subject is the point of the psychoanalytic process seems spot-on" (832)"That this recognition takes place through affect (Stein, 1991; Spezzano, 1993) complicates matters. Affects, to come at the problem from the other side, are by nature intersubjective. As Mitchell (2000) and Morrison (1989) see it, they are highly contagious" (832)"Maybe you don't like perverse sexual practices, but that's not your business... Trying to hold all my responses in mind, I negotiate between acceptance and rejection, attraction and repulsion, curiosity, disgust, and boredom - a sort of guarded neutrality, if what we mean these days by neutrality is some point of balance (see Greenberg, 1933 for a related idea). Neutral in the I Ching sense of "no blame," I try to stay the Zen course of accepting what exists because it exists" (833)"But you can't do this condescendingly, as though one day your patient will scale the heterosexual heights" (834)"Look at it this way: If gender as an elemental structure of dominance and subordination is so critical to psyche, soma, and culture, is it any wonder that we think of perversion as inevitably sadomasochistic?" (835)"In a power structure, someone has to be the ninny. In a power structure, weakness and longings for closeness - call them ninniness and tenderness - tend to fuse" (836)"After the Catholic church, psychoanalysis is, in [Foucault's] thought, perhaps the exemplary disciplinary power - its pronouncements routinely enforcing social injustice through the apparent neutrality of objective science" (837)"One job of psychoanalysis is, after all, to reveal to the suffering the thing that, denied, sickens them" (838)"When he says to his readers, "Look, you may think that this perverse desire is beneath you, you may think only lower types like peasants engage in it, but the truth is that you, the civilized, want it too," he simultaneously liberates and imprisons, frees by naming and binds by shaming" (837)"Freud denied perversions as "sexual activities which either (a) extend, in an anatomical sense, beyond the regions of the body that are designed for sexual union, or (b) linger over the intermediate relations to the sexual object which should normally be traversed rapidly on the path towards the final sexual aim" (p. 150)" (838)"The normal is the heterosexual, the coital, the reproductive... I call it PIV - penis in vagina" (838)"In the discourse of psychosexuality, perversion and heteronormality constitute each other's limits. Perversion marks the boundary across which you become an outlaw. Normality marks off the territory that, if stayed inside, keeps you safe from shame, disgust, and anxiety" (838)"Lacan would contrast desire with need: Nee, like hunger, must have one thing and one thing only, food. Desire thrives on substitutes" (840)"Remember Gordon Lightfoot's verse about the room where you do what you don't confess? Shame, excitement, pleasure, the overriding of disgust. And why should you confess?" (841)"Perverts do hate the truth, he insisted, but what truth is that?... Bronski suggested, because the pervert is always on the outside, always the other: "The 'truth', as it is so carefully and lovingly called, is almost always what is held as a cherished belief by those in the dominant culture: those with power, those who have the power to name - and, as it follows, to name-call." Truth, in Foucauldian view, is an effect of power, a form of domination that les psy embody in characterizing perversion" (842)"To rewrite Laplanche and Pontalis (1973) as quoted at the beginning of note 4. "It is difficult to comprehend the idea of the norm otherwise than by reference to a perversion"" (843)"The first part is a Tower of Psychoanalytic Babel. It attempts to have it all - to retain the classical model of fetishism and sexuality while incorporating the language and findings, most notably and rather surprisingly, of ego-psychology, as well as those of object relations" (845)"In the second section, the struggle to integrate theories of attachment and narcissism with drive theory has vanished. This herculean effort is no longer necessary because in the 15 years between the two writings, from 1965 to 1979, the paradigm had shifted. By 1979, it was possible to dispense with references to the classicial one-person model of genitality and drive and to focus on matters of narcissistic integration and damage and of broken and restored interpersonal relatedness, and so it was possible to tell a simple, accessible story, a story of the negation and recovery of self" (845-846)"Fetishism, in Khan's (1979) view, is not about sex; it's about a state of mind. Things, or body-parts, are used to regulate not sex but psychic equilibrium, which in turn is primally dependent on the quality of object relations" (846)"Interpreting sexuality in object-relational terms is now an indelible part of our view and technique. Consider Ogden's (1989) choice to "use the term 'perverse' to refer to forms of sexuality that are used in the service of denying the separateness of external objects and sexual difference, and thus interfere with the elaboration of the depressive position" (p. 166, n. 11). Perversion here still denotes sexuality, but only the sexuality that defends against object-relational dangers. What is really wrong in a perversion, then, is not sex but relatedness and, by implication, development if not character itself" (849)"When perversion relocates from sex to relatedness, its moral baggage comes along. If psychoanalysis once carved heterosexual order out of the polymorphously perverse jungle, now it fashions a model of mature total object relation as the criterion of mental health" (849)"I am concerned, as I said earlier, with psychoanalytic participation in domination - in naming, blaming, truth framing, and shaming. You might think of this psychoanalytic re-creation of the cultural morality producing it as a sort of aggression" (851)"At the same time, this redefinition of normality is an act of imperialism. Speaking from the center of psychoanalytic power, of disciplinary authority, it colonizes the sexual margins, allowing the conventional to own the unconventional without any of the risks of unconventionality. In a royal co-optation of the sexual revolution, Love Relations renders perverse erotics acceptable, but only under the condition that it be practiced by that guardian of nonconformity, the heterosexual, married couple" (851)"But, in Kernberg's own oeuvre, the procreating couple still reigns as the navel of the psychoanalytic universe - a stable center of sanity and social responsibility. I don't understand, then, how it can also situate rebellion and asociality" (852)"Following Foucault, we must conclude that sadomasochism is the principal psychodynamic animating the desire and struggle for power fueling the infrastructures of contemporary society, and it shows up everywhere authority and hierarchy are found (Chancer, 1992), including, need I say, in psychoanalysis" (853)"The label of perversion is a clinically superfluous as we now understand the label of homosexuality to be. It is not a diagnostic category; it does not tell us what to do. Now we take our clinical cue not from disorders of desire but from struggles of self and relationship - splits in psyche, maladies of object love, infirmities of intimacy" (853)"A great absence in Khan's clinical account is of his own concordant countertransference to perversion. Had he been able to empathize, might he have found a way to help his patients keep the glow or create it elsewhere?" (854)Empathy’s danger in obscuring what we know. Being descriptive about what we are feeling and what we are assuming in countertransference. It’s about asking: where does our knowledge come from?"The effort of loving him, even as he wards me off with gestures and sentiments soaked in hatred, echoes my struggle to negotiate between the love speech of naming and the hate speech of blaming; the depressive position being always in precarious balance, love and hate are never far apart, and intimacy is always both challenged and made possible by aggression" (855)"There are many routes to sanity, maturity, sexuality" (855)"Chodorow (1992) wisely connected perversion and liveliness: "If we retain passion and intensity for heterosexuality, we are in the arena of symptom, neurosis, and disorder; if we depervesionize heterosexuality, giving up its claim to intensity and passion, we make it less interesting to us and to its practitioners" (p. 301)" (855)"Perversion, Ogden argued, shows up in analysis as a defense against deadness, even if his prescription was the family-values usual... Are there no other ways to represent life, exuberance, passion, and pleasure besides reproductive heterosexuality?" (856)"There needs to be a way to back off from the authoritarian and dominating inclinations that psychoanalysis shares with other regulatory practices. Remembering doubt is one route; writing disruptively is another" (856)"How different from the certitude of marking Love Relations, a seamless narrative that seems to wrap everything up in the service of truth but also hides all the loose ends. Notes pull on those threads, rupture the surface coherence, or at least I hope they do" (856)"Perversion is us. What, after all, is pathology? If perversion can coexist with health, if its status as illness varies with cultural time and place, then, sexualities may claim wholesomeness, if all have a valid psychic place, then all are subject to the same psychic vicissitudes. Put yet another way, sexuality has nothing inherently to do with mental health or mental illness" (857)"And who's to say that there's something wrong... something wrong with that... something wrong with you?" (857)