ABSTRACT
By the beginning of the twentieth century, the first explorations into psychoanalytic theory and practice start to change the nature of sexual discourse amongst prominent psychiatrists. The recognition that psychic events are related to specific causes begins a shift from the medical model of diagnosis, classification, and recording of symptoms, to consideration of psychic structure and its relationship to psychopathology, with verification through focused studies of individuals and their personalities. Kernberg identifies containment of would-be perverse qualities as the key difference between perversion and normality, and of critical significance in the evolving psychoanalytic literature that divides sexual perversions into two major groups according to the level of severity. Freud accepts perversion as a debasement of adult sexual relationship. Freud divides early sexual development into oral, anal, and phallic phases, corresponding to erotogenic zones of the body, and culminating in the desire for the opposite-sex parent, and removal of the parent of the same sex.
