ABSTRACT
It is widely recognized in recent times that perversion is not limited to a person's sexual behaviour, but may influence all of an individual's experiences, relations, and attitudes to reality. This chapter explores the issue in relation to pain, pleasure, and thought, and suggests that the perverse relations in each case are "constructed", in contrast to experiences that are "suffered" and "discovered" to arise within the self. The differentiation of pain as a felt thing that is used and pain that is suffered and thence discovered by the person is consistent with a parallel development of thought on perversion that looks at the way disavowal or misrepresentation can be used to obscure an unwanted discovery of reality. The chapter talks about the difference between perverse pleasure, which is constructed and inflicted on the self, and pleasure that is suffered, in the sense of discovered as arising within the self.
