ABSTRACT
The psychoanalytic understanding of perversion has come a long way, beginning with Sigmund Freud’s early writing on the subject. This chapter outlines its theoretical landmarks and changes over the years, before moving on to the approach. The understanding of perversion in psychoanalytic thinking may be divided into two major frameworks: the drive model and the object-relations model. Freud’s theory of sexuality and perversion remains a drive theory, focusing on the Oedipus complex and castration anxiety. Rather than an oedipal world, severe perversion is rooted in the world of Pentheus, which has its beginnings in transvestism and voyeurism, continues on to exhibitionism, and goes as far as sado-masochistic violence and cannibalistic murder. It is a world ruled by a mixture of a mother’s madness and devourment, derangement, and orgiastic intoxication, and the combination of rituals of desire with destruction and death.
