Rethinking Perversion

What Parsons' Ideas Suggest About Sex, Love, and Connection

Recently I had the opportunity to reread Michael Parsons’ paper, “Sexuality and Perversion a Hundred Years On,” which asks: How has psychoanalysis reworked Freud’s conceptualization of sexuality to give us our own contemporary understanding of it? And how might we now understand perversion? In the following, I’ll offer some thoughts and reflections on this clarifying paper.

The Disappearing Diagnosis

Notably, the category of perversion has almost disappeared from our diagnostic manuals and texts. Open the Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual (PDM-2 or PDM-3) or Nancy McWilliams’ influential Psychoanalytic Diagnosis, and you won’t find “perversion” listed as a diagnostic category. The term has largely vanished from contemporary psychoanalytic nosology, replaced in the DSM by the more clinical-sounding “paraphilias” starting in 1980 with DSM-III.

McWilliams does discuss sexualization – the use of sexual feelings or behaviors to manage anxiety, avoid intimacy, or discharge aggression – as a defense mechanism. In fact, I think this shift from diagnostic category to defense mechanism tells us something important about how psychoanalytic thinking has evolved in recent years.

Freud’s Original Framework: Source, Aim, Object

Parsons reminds us of one of Freud’s foundational idea: drives have a source (bodily), an aim (what the drive aims to accomplish), and an object (what allows the drive to reach its aim).

Freud’s formulation, which was deeply influenced by Darwin’s biological thinking, holds that the the aim is primary. The object’s value is really only functional: Does it allow the drive to achieve its aim? In the sexual drive, this means: Does it lead to reproduction? In that sense, anything that deviated from genital heterosexual intercourse aimed at procreation could be considered perverse, a “deviation in respect of the sexual aim or object.” In this way, Freud was bound to his time and theorizing within the Darwinian framework that dominated science at the turn-of-the-century.

From Drive Derivatives to Object-Relatedness

But here’s where it gets interesting. Parsons outlines a singificant evolution in how analysts understand what makes something perverse. The shift is not in the behaviors themselves, but in what the behaviors are defending against.

In the early psychoanalytic view, perversion defends against instinctual derivatives, especially oedipal guilt and castration anxiety. The fetish, the ritual, the “deviant” act all manage unbearable drive pressures. In the contemporary view, perversion defends against object-relatedness itself, against the risk of genuine emotional intimacy, vulnerability, and mutuality.

This is a significant shift. Here are a few theorists Parsons mentions:

• Robert Stoller (1975): Perversion is characterized by the desire to harm the object, to dehumanize the other person so as to avoid the risk of intimacy.

• Mervin Glasser (1986): “Through sado-masochism the individual establishes a firm grip on the object but this grip also entails keeping the object at arm’s length.”

• Joyce McDougall (1986): “Perhaps in the last resort only relationships may aptly be termed perverse.” Not acts, not desires, but the quality of emotional connection.

• Masud Khan (1979): The pervert “puts an impersonal object between his desire and his accomplice,” such as a a stereotyped fantasy, a fetish, a pornographic image that alienates the pervert from both himself and the object of desire.

A New Definition

Parsons synthesizes these developments into a helpful reformulation: perversion is the sexualization of the avoidance of mutuality.

In other words, it’s anything which:

1. Places something between the person and the object to foreclose a relationship based on respect for and pleasure in the otherness and personhood of the object

2. Turns this relational situation into an occasion for sexual excitement

Perversion, in this view, is about whether another person’s separate subjectivity can be tolerated or whether it must be controlled, denied, or annihilated.

Fairbairn’s Challenge

Parsons links this evolution to W.R.D. Fairbairn’s radical challenge to drive theory. For Fairbairn, “libido is essentially object-seeking.” We don’t seek objects to discharge drives; we seek connection. Objects matter to us “for what they are in themselves” instead of as merely as vehicles for drive satisfaction. Although Fairbairn’s was seen as abandoning drive theory entirely, Parsons suggests that perhaps Fairbairn was challenging not the idea of drives, but the subordination of object to aim – the notion that what matters about an object is whether it serves our aims.

Reconceiving Sexuality

This leads Parsons to propose that we consider Freud’s paradigm, as follows: a drive consists of source, aim, and quality of relatedness to object.

This isn’t abandoning biology. On the contrary, sexuality remains “rooted in the body, in the conscious and unconscious accumulation of the experience of the body.” But how meanings are attached to that biological given, what relational possibilities it opens or forecloses, are shaped by “how a society interprets that biological fact.” Sexuality, like childhood itself, is “less a fact of nature and more an interpretation of it.”

Clinical Implications

This reconceptualization has significant clinical implications:

1. It helps us to think about whether a relationship is perverse based not on object choice, but on quality of relatedness.

2. It offers a new approach to gender, bringing male and female sexuality into closer relation rather than seeing them as fundamentally different in nature.

3. It helps explain why female perversion has been harder to conceptualize than male perversion. In the past, male phallic gratification seemed easier to define, but this “clarity” was an oversimplification from focusing on aim at the expense of relatedness.

4. It links sexuality to love. No longer primarily about discharge and aim-fulfillment, but about “the quality of object-relatedness.”

The Unfolding Conversation

When we move from asking “what acts are perverse?” to “what quality of relatedness is perverse?”, we’re asking different questions:

• Can you tolerate your partner’s separate subjectivity?

• Can you surrender to mutual vulnerability?

• Can you allow yourself to be impacted by another’s otherness?

• Or must you control, objectify, depersonalize, or merge in ways that annihilate he difference between you?

These questions matter whether we’re thinking about fetishes or “vanilla” sex, about casual encounters or committed relationships, about the consulting room or the bedroom. “Sexuality,” Parsons says, “is a concept whose meaning can develop and evolve, as the culture that it is part of develops and evolves.” And in this view the most important question isn’t “what is perverse?” but instead, “What allows sexuality to serve connection rather than defend against it?”

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References

Parsons, M. (2000). Sexuality and perversion a hundred years on: Discovering what Freud discovered. The International journal of psycho-analysis, 81(1), 37.