ABSTRACT
As with hostility, risk is sometimes part of the manifest content of the perverse act—in the grossly sadistic or masochistic perversions—and sometimes only latent, as in the fetishisms. Sexual boredom is especially the result of the loss of sense of risk. Sexual excitement is, then, the product of an oscillation between the possibility of failure and the anticipation of triumph. The perversion is the complicated path that threads its way through the dangers to triumphant sexual gratification. Triumph requires overcoming odds, but if the danger in adult life were as severe as it had been in childhood, pleasure would be absent and thus there would be no perversion. So devices—safety factors—must be built into the fantasy to reduce anxiety and guarantee that the odds are decisively loaded in favor of triumph. This chapter presents a case which exemplifies how risk and revenge are formed into excitement in perversion.
