ABSTRACT
Having qualified as a clinical psychologist, Heather Wood trained as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist and has worked at the Portman Clinic in London for the past ten years.
This is an outpatient psychotherapy clinic, founded 75 years ago, which treats people with a history of violence or sexual perversion. The range of perversions is wide, and the clinical knowledge is derived from long-term therapy of people who seek treatment voluntarily.
While some of the chapters in this book explore the perverse component of addictions, this chapter examines the addictive qualities of perversions. The fantasies that drive this sexual behaviour are complex and often mutually contradictory and will often be more explicit than those that drive drug or alcohol addiction. The underlying defensive purpose is often very similar, but the childhood trauma is often more clearly linked to the adult psychopathology.
Wood poses the question “Why is insight not enough to enable someone to gain self-control?” and later suggests that for this change to take place, there must be the experience within the therapy of the 152 underlying terror and the experience that it can be contained and made bearable. It is not an intellectual process. Implicit in this is the assumption that the central sexual fantasy may not change, but its power to dominate the person’s life may be attenuated.
