ABSTRACT
Regarding sexuality, peoples' minds are as attached to cultural "facts" as they might be to comparable "facts" emanating from our own bodies. Each set of "facts", whether coming from our interiors or from the external world, makes, as Freud puts it, "a demand on their mind for work". These ongoing cultural facts—and their cumulative demands—will not disappear; they are, in effect, permanent. In relation to normal and aberrant sexuality, the clinical psychoanalyst can find protective support from both theory and experience for almost whatever he/she thinks. This kind of support utterly lacks utility. Its net result does nothing to affirm that the analyst is making psychoanalytic judgments. Aberrations were masquerades, whose idiosyncratic aims and objects obscured a deeper failure to achieve the standard ones. A few widespread forms of sexual disguise (or masquerade) weave their way through Freud's original essay. Each of these, like any necessary masquerade, is grounded in a sense of lack or deficiency.
