ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book. The book draws out the implications of Freud's work, but also of various other traditions in the history of psychoanalysis (Kleinian, object-relations, self-psychology, Lacanian, Reichian), in order to formulate their own explanations of perversion. Most contemporary psychoanalysts rely on one (or both) of the two basic paradigms of perversion in Freud's work, on the one hand that of the partial drives and their vicissitudes and on the other hand that of castration anxiety. Over and beyond the particular challenges posed by perversion to the theoretical and clinical doctrine of psychoanalysis, perhaps psychoanalysts are also challenged in their explanatory power because thoroughbred perverts, assuming that they actually exist, rarely come to their attention. The book encounters the intervention of a socio-cultural standard of ethico-legal acceptability, which has (often implicitly) confounded all of the purportedly value-free taxonomies of sexual perversion, whether sexological, psychiatric, or psychoanalytic.
