ABSTRACT
Nineteenth-century positivist sexology, which produced the term "perversion" for a type of sexuality, gave itself the ethico-legal mission of distinguishing the "pervert" from the "libertine". Perversion is an ethical concept and is commonly used as a moral reproach. As with every perversion, even masochism is a strategy for deriving pleasure from something initially very unpleasant. Exhibitionism is a perversion in so far as it does not inaugurate, but substitutes for, a shared sexual action. In his early theory of perversion, Freud defined neuroses as "the negative of perversions". The analysis of fetishism has occupied an eminent place in psychoanalytic theory, if perhaps for no other reason than that Freud dealt with it in order to elaborate his very important theory of Ichspaltung, the splitting of the Ego. For the early psychoanalysts, the woman is almost never perverse simply because she is so by her very psychic constitution. Freud spoke of feminine masochism: qua female, the woman is a masochist.
