ABSTRACT
Other factors besides hostility, risk, and reversal of trauma to triumph— on which this study concentrates— are also necessary for perversion formation. Freud made it clear that instinctual vicissitude is the result of hostility— of two sorts: namely, that inflicted on us from the outside and that generated intrapsychically in reaction. Most analytic workers have looked more closely at intrapsychic dynamics of hostility when searching for the etiology of perversions, for that is the traditional analytic process of discovery. From this perspective, which places hostility in the center, the perversion lies in the meaning of the act, wherein is hatred and a need to damage, not love, one’s partner. Each episode of sexual excitement entices the return to the surface of the questions and fantasies that are the mystery. The resultant anxiety can now be reduced only by the perverse act, which, however, in its performance or in its fantasied state raises again the questions in the mystery.
