Magyar László szerk.: Orvostörténeti közlemények 166-169. (Budapest, 1999)
TANULMÁNYOK — ARTICLES - Porter, Roy: Perversion in the past. — Perverzió a múltban
primed to take erotic pleasure from all bodily parts and activities and bodily products. 17 Maturation, via the Oedipal crisis, involves abandonment of polymorphous pleasure for adult genital sexuality. Failure to surmount the Oedipal stage through this process may lead to neuroses like hysteria; or it may spell arrested development, that is, perversion — hence Freud's celebrated contention, spelt out in the Three Essays, that "neuroses are, so to say, the negative of perversions " — or, put another way, "hysteria is not repudiated sexuality but rather repudiated perversion" 1 * The neurotic and the pervert are parallel, complementary and mutually exclusive instances of deficient psycho-sexual development. Within Freud's theory, all the classic manifestations of perversion (masturbation, fetishobjects, playing with faeces, and so forth) are residues of infantile practices that immature individuals never transcend. "Every pathological disorder of social life", he argued, "is rightly to be regarded as an inhibition in development" — sexual perversions being "dissociations from the normal development ", that is, "a fragment of inhibited development and infantilism" 19 Perversion is ultimately infantile sexuality. The pervert suffers from fixation or from regression. As Dollimore has noted, we are all, for Freud, born perverts; some then grow out of it. 20 The pervert is thus a Peter Pan figure, the person who never grew up, in Freud's erotic teleology whose unashamed end was reproductive sex. "If a child has a sexual life at all", he maintained, "it is bound to be of a perverse kind; for, except for a few obscure hints, children are without what makes sexuality into the reproductive function. On the other hand, the abandonment of the reproductive function is the common feature of all perversions. We actually describe a sexual activity as perverse ifit has given up the aim of reproduction and pursues the attainment of pleasures as an aim independent of it. So ... the breach and turning-point in the development of sexual life lies in its becoming subordinate to the purposes of reproduction ". 21 As will be clear, Freud's account of the perversions was in its own way a matter of old wine in new bottles: the time-honoured notion of the abnormality of non-procreative coitus cast within a theory af personal, psychological development. Infantile sexuality explains the perversions, and the perversions in turn attest the reality of infantile sexuality. In his most prescriptive mode, Freud maintained that the only proper role for perverse acts in the mature adult lay in foreplay. It is alright to gaze, sniff or suck, so long as you got on to intercourse pretty smartish; for sexual activities that "linger over the intermediate relations to the sexual object which should normally be traversed rapidly See Freud, S.: "Three essays on the theory of sexuality" (1905), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, transi, and ed. by Strachey, J. et al. (London, The Hogarth Press & the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1953—1974), 7, pp. 123—245; for illuminating exegesis, see Dollimore, J.: Sexual dissidence; Augustine to Wilde, Freud lo Foucault (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 179. Peculiarly, there have been very few detailed historical analyses of the development of Freud's thinking on sexuality. Some of the strategic tensions within Freud's thinking are suggestively explored in Gilman, S.: Freud, race and gender (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1993). Freud, S.: Three essays on the theory of sexuality, p. 165. Freud, S.: Three essays on the theory of sexuality, p. 208. Dollimore, J.: Sexual Dissidence, p. 172. Freud, S.: Introductory lectures on psycho-analysis, (1916—17), in The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud, transi, and ed. by Strachey, J. et al. (London, The Hogarth Press & the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1953—1974), 16., p. 316.
