Perversions and Near-Perversions in Clinical Practice: New Psychoanalytic Perspectives

The traditional psychoanalytical definition of perversion stresses deviant behaviour, including such categories as transvestism, fetishism, sexual sado-masochism, exhibitionism, voyeurism, paedophilia, and bestiality. However, as Freud noted, there are polymorphous perverse elements in everyone's sexual fantasies and behaviours, and the line between normality and abnormality is difficult to draw. In this book prominent psychoanalysts present the latest psychoanalytic perpectives on the perverse, expanding the definition to behaviours that are not overtly sexual and at the same time defining perversion more specifically. The authors, who view perversion from developmental, clinical, sociocultural, and literary-philosophical points of view, shed new light on a topic that concerns every mental health professional who has clinical contact with an adult population.