ABSTRACT
The central problem with the category 'Sexual Aberrations' is that the category seems to always lean on local specificities: time, place, subculture, and person. The persistence of the category of sexual aberrations is grounded in the persistence of the necessity for sexual regulation. When regulation itself is infiltrated with the very sexuality it aims to control, the line between an appetite for regulation and an appetite for sex vanishes. Psychoanalysis has had, and still has, a vexed and unstable relationship to the permanently contested category of sexual aberrations. The psychoanalysts have provided, and continue to provide, both clinical and theoretical support to a conservative, prescriptive vision of the properly sexual. The ongoing tension between normality's aspiration to accommodate and individual's aspirations against accommodation and toward unrestrained liberty finds both its first and its clearest expression in Sigmund Freud's foundational essay, 'The Sexual Aberrations'. Freud's essay is line-drawing, regulatory, and conservative while also line-breaking, libratory, and radical.
