ABSTRACT
In 1905 Freud made the observation that girls from some families grow up
to become neurotic while their brothers develop aberrations (perversions)
of sexual behaviour. This view of genderdifferentiated psychopathologies
has recently become a focus for the exploration of psychological difference
between the sexes. In this chapter I explore why certain psychological
problems predominate in one sex rather than the other. I compare a bulimic
woman with a man who felt compelled to use hard-core pornography for
solitary masturbation. Through this comparison I hope to shed further light
on the debates which have emerged around Freud’s theory of perversion,
and in particular the challenges which have been mounted to his view of
perversion as predominantly male. Certainly some types of perversion,
such as fetishism and exhibitionism, are still found almost exclusively in
men. But some psychotherapists have argued that women too suffer from
their own specific types of perversion. These do not focus on the genitals,
as in men, but on the woman’s entire body or the products of her body – her
children. Predominantly female problems such as self-starvation
(anorexia) and bulimia (binge-eating and vomiting), which in the past
might have been seen as neurotic or hysterical, are now sometimes
described as female perversions (Welldon 1988, Kaplan 1991). Is this re-
categorisation helpful? How do women’s psychological problems differ
from men’s, and why?
