ABSTRACT
Even when language is available for expressing feelings, we cannot accurately measure something as complex, paradoxical, variable, and contradictory as our desire for, rage against, envy of, pleasure in, or love of another person. How much less, then, can we know the mind—or more accurately, the protomind—of the preverbal infant, one of the necessary objects of a study of perversion. Since Freud first showed it, we have known that in humans fantasy is as much part of the etiology of perversions—more, of all sexual excitement—as are the physiological and environmental factors the sex researchers are helping us understand. The details of the perversion—the story line—are incomprehensible in their origin and meaning if one ignores the process and function of fantasy. The hostility is often easy to find. For a number of perversions, it is a central feature of the manifest content and marks, even for the untrained observer, the bizarreness of the condition.
