Perversion: Psychoanalytic Perspectives

Perversion—its ubiquity in infantile life and its persistence in the psychical and sexual lives of some adults—was a central element of Freud’s lifelong empirical and theoretical work. Many psychoanalytic schools and orientations have since revisited the problem of perversion. Some authors have sharpened the definition of perversion by differentiating it from perverse fantasies, so-called near-perversions, and perverse traits, whereas others have sought to re-conceptualize perversion as an er…