Magyar László szerk.: Orvostörténeti közlemények 166-169. (Budapest, 1999)

TANULMÁNYOK — ARTICLES - Porter, Roy: Perversion in the past. — Perverzió a múltban

celebration of the polymorphously perverse Rabelaisian universe, with all its buttocks, arses, mouths, cavities and orifices — a carnivalesque view brilliantly developed by Peter Stallybrass and Allon White's The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (1986), with its elision of perversion and subversion.

30 For such writers, what is problematic is not perversion — aberrant sexual acts — but rather the disgust they excite in society. The focus is thereby shifted from the psychobiological to the socio-cultural, to taboos and their transgression.

31 It is, however, proper to note certain blind spots in Freud. Freud's imagination failed him when it came to de Sade (about whom he has strangely little to say). He was also notably silent on the social relativity, as distinct from the personal psychopathology, of sexual behaviour. Some of his contemporaries were more alert and eloquent. Iwan Bloch, for instance, in The Sexual Life of Our Time, in its Relations to Modern Civilization (1907), repudiated, alongside Freud, degenerationist myths of sexuality, but, unlike Freud, insisted that understanding of perversion must be cross-cultural, or, in his terms, "anthropological" and "ethnographical". Bloch argued the need to analyse the heterogeneity of modern sexual practices alongside the sexual practices of other civilizations — not so as to pinpoint progress or measure degeneration, but to understand the primary role of custom, convention and culture in moulding sexual behaviour. Bloch also observed that, given the singular importance of gender and class differentiations in modern Europe, it could be no surprise that such factors played key roles in selection of sexual diversities (e.g., flagellation). Only anthropological and ethnographic perspectives could afford an adequate understanding of sexual variation. It is, in my view, no accident that Bloch wrote a work called Der Marquis de Sade und seine Zeit (1900).

32 30 Bakhtin, M. M.: Rabelais and his world, transi, by Iswolsky, H. (Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1968); Stallybrass, P., White, A. The politics and poetics of transgression (Ithaca, N. Y., Cornell University Press, 1986). 3 ' Critics of Freudian psychoanalysis have long contended that it internalizes and treats as fantasy what is properly social, cultural and political; such depoliticizing thereby contributes to victim-blaming. For criticism along these lines, see Holland, E. W.: "The suppression of politics in the establishment of psychoanalysis", Salmagundi, no. 66 (1985), pp. 155—170; Schatzman, M.: Soul murder, Persecution in the family (New York, Random House, 1973); idem: The story of Ruth. One woman's haunting psychiatric Odyssey (London, Duckworth, 1980). Feminist critics have developed these lines, contending that Freud thereby mystified the gender relations of patriarchy. See Bernheimer, C, Kahane, C. (eds): In Dora's case: Freud, hysteria and feminism (New York, Columbia University Press, 1985); Tomes, N.: "Feminist histories of psychiatry", in Micale, M., Porter, R. (eds): Discovering the history of psychiatry (New York/Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1993), Herman, E.: The competition: psychoanalysis, its feminist interpreters and the idea of sexual freedom 1910—1930", Free Associations, 3, 1992, pp. 391—438. 32 See Bloch, I.: The sexual life of our time, in its relations to modern civilization (New York, Allied, 1958; orig. publ. 1907), 456ff.; idem: The sexual life of our time, transi. Paul, M. E. (London, Rebman, 1909); idem: Sex life in England illustrated: as revealed in its obscene literature and art, transi. Deniston, R. (New York, Falstaff, 1934); idem: Sexual life in England past and present, transi. Forstern, W. H. (London, Arco, 1958); idem: A history of English sexual morals, transi. Fostern, W. H. (London, Francis Aldor, 1936/1988); idem: Anthropological studies in the strange. Sexual practices of all races and all ages, ancient and modern, oriental and occidental, primitive and civilized, transi. Wallis, K. (New York, Anthropological Press, 1933); idem: Ethnological and cultural studies of the sex life in England (New York, Falstaff Press, 1934). Bloch'

s biography of Sade was translated as Marquis de Sade: The man and his age: studies in the history of the culture and morals of the eighteenth century (Newark, Julian Press, 1931). No adequate of Bloch exists in English. See however Egger, B.: Iwan Bloch und die Konstituierung der Sexualwissenschaft als eigene