ABSTRACT
In the field of deviation, any behaviour falling outside the social norm was traditionally deemed pathological. This was the case with sexual perversion. The concept of perversion is ambiguous and open to criticism on many accounts—in particular, because in the course of time its definition has increasingly been characterized by moral or normative considerations. The term perversion, which denotes a deviation from the norm, tells us nothing about the origin, context or nature of the process concerned. In psychoanalytic terms, every perversion involves a process of degradation of the love object, whereby the person is transformed into a thing. In fetishism, for example, the vehicle of sexual imagination is the concrete object, which replaces a human object. The uncertainty of definition also affects the terminology, which appears quite lacking in expressiveness when compared with the nature of perversion.
