ABSTRACT
In his chapter Gabriele Pasquali shows that a perversion protects against the emotional pain of intimacy. A dream, which was in three parts, each of which described a sexual activity, was crucial to understanding how his patient, a young woman, had not been able to be emotionally intimate because of perverse sexual excitement in three modes. These were represented in the dream and enacted in the analysis. Her fear of intimacy derived from childhood experience but was only combated when the secret sexual fantasies came into the open in the analysis. In this case, her emotional pain was imprisoned by her masochistic excitement with physical pain.
