The Cambridge Companion to Freud by Jerome Neu
Author:Jerome Neu [Jerome Neu]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780521374248
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
CRITERIA OF PERVERSION
Once one accepts Freud’s view of the complexity of the underlying sexual instinct, the old content criterion for perversion and pathology must be abandoned. As Freud writes, “In the sphere of sexual life we are brought up against peculiar and, indeed, insoluble difficulties as soon as we try to draw a sharp line to distinguish mere variations within the range of what is physiological from pathological symptoms” (1905d, VII, 160–1).
It might seem simple enough to provide a sociological or statistical specification of perversion, but there are difficulties. For what precisely would the statistics reflect? One’s questionnaires or surveys might seek to discover what the majority regards as perverse, but that would leave one wanting to know what perversion is (after all, members of the majority might in fact be applying very various standards). One might try to avoid direct circularity by, without mentioning the concept perversion, trying to elicit information revealing of which sexual desires the majority disapproves. But circularity reemerges on this approach because there might be all sorts of different grounds for disapproval (aesthetic, moral, religious, political, biological, medical, to name a few), and what one wants is to single out those desires and practices that are disapproved of as (specifically) perverse. It appears one’s questions and evidence would have already to be applying some standard of perversion in order to achieve that singling out. Parallel and further problems would apply to surveys of actual sexual practices. (Are perversions necessarily rare? If a practice became popular, would it therefore cease to be perverse? And if a practice were rare, e.g. celibacy or adultery, would that necessarily make it perverse?) Surely perversion is meant to mark only a certain kind of deviation from a norm. And there is another difficulty. For whatever method one uses, it will turn out that what counts as perversion will vary from society to society, will vary over time and place, in short, will be culturally relative. So insofar as one’s concern is wider than the views of a particular society or group, insofar as it is a concern with general psychological theory, with the nature of human nature, no sociological approach will do. Moreover, insofar as one’s concern is personal, or perhaps even therapeutic (unless one’s standards of therapy are simply adaptation to local and contemporary prevailing norms), that is, if one is concerned to know how one ought to live one’s life (including one’s sexual life), a sociological approach will not do. For one’s society may be wrongheaded, prejudiced, misguided, or in other ways mistaken. One has only one life to live. It might be necessary to resist one’s society’s demands or even to leave it. So one must look further.
Perhaps perversion can still be defined in terms of content if we are willing to start (again) with the popular view of normal sexuality as consisting of heterosexual genital intercourse between adults: then, any sexual desire or practice that goes beyond the body parts intended for sexual union, or that
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Behaviorism | Cognitive Behavioral Therapy |
Existential | Gestalt |
Humanistic | Jungian |
Psychoanalysis | Transpersonal |
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