ABSTRACT
Since Freud, the discourse on sexual deviations has made a full circle. Before Freud, sexual aberrations were considered to be rare, sinful and criminal. In a word: Evil. Freud himself demonstrated that sexual deviations are not that rare and can even be understood as part of normal psychosexual development. It is only in cases where fixation and regression were apparent that he considered them to be pathological. As a result, the pre-Freudian criminal sinner was reinterpreted as a patient who had to be treated. After Freud, and largely due to his theory, Western society became much more liberal. Furthermore, the Kinsey Reports of 1948 and 1953 empirically demonstrated that almost nobody fits the norm, i.e., heterosexual coitus in the missionary position with orgasm for both participants. The explanation can be found in Freud’s study of infantile sexuality, as elaborated in the still magisterial Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and further developed in a number of later texts. In short, Freud discovered what every nanny long knew, namely, that
sexuality begins from childhood onwards, if in a very unique manner. There is no such thing as a genital instinct that irresistibly thrusts man toward woman and vice versa right from the start. It is a question not of human instincts, but of drives. The life of the drive develops through the component drives that are only later gathered under the coordinating flag of so-called genital sexuality. These drives are both partial and autoerotic. Partial means that they concentrate on certain bodily areas (oral, anal, genital … ) rather than on the body in its entirety. Autoerotic means that these drives focus first on parts of the subject’s body, not on that of the other. On the basis of these readily observable data, Freud concludes that our sexuality is grounded in a polymorphously perverse predisposition. Moreover, this polymorphously perverse predisposition is the basis of the original and universal predisposition of the human sexual drive.1 Almost any ‘adult’ perverse trait can be observed in the child, putting perversion in a completely different light.2
Consequently, according to Freudian theory, the distinction between ‘normal’ perverse traits and the perverse structure is not easy to make. The combination between Kinsey and Freud provided a secure base to the
sexual revolution and the accompanying liberalization in Western society. The net result is that almost every sexual interaction has become acceptable as long as there is mutual consent between the partners. Strangely enough, this means that we have returned to a society in which sexual deviation has become again synonymous with a crime! The nineteenth century sinner/ criminal who was turned into a twentieth-century patient has now become a twenty-first-century perpetrator. The so-called liberalization has made things very unclear, because the ‘diagnostic’ criterion for sexual deviation has become more or less synonymous with the absence of informed consent between the partners. Hence the two main contemporary categories of sexual deviancy: rape and paedosexuality. Yet again, in a word: Evil. A similar reduction shows its effects on another important concept in the
forensic field: psychopathy. Throughout its history, this concept was often on the verge of being reduced to antisocial behaviour. When Prichard launched the term of moral insanity in 1835, he designated a group of patients with deficiencies in the affective faculty. To Prichard the term ‘moral’ referred primarily to the emotional and conative aspects of the psyche, as in ‘moral treatment’. Nevertheless, this diagnostic label owed much of its success to the systematic misinterpretation of the word ‘moral’ as referring to antisocial.3 In the second half of the nineteenth century, synonyms such as constitutional inferiority and degenerative insanity became very popular, expressing the idea that psychopathy is associatedwith innate evil. Although subsequent psychiatrists developed a more comprehensive concept of psychopathy, its judgemental undertones never disappeared. Popular media have taken over this narrow interpretation and continue to portray an image of the psychopath as a thoroughly bad criminal. This image, however, does not correspond with the current scientific notion of psychopathy, in which a set of personality features are defined that can be applied in a non-forensic context. Indeed, an eminent scholar in this area advanced Oskar Schindler, the saviour of hundreds of Jews, as a psychopath.4
