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

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

PERVERSION IN THE PAST ROY PORTER Confusion reigns in sexology and psychiatry, to say nothing of the law, on the subject of sexual perversion, or sexual deviance (the less stigmatizing term) or paraphilia (the modern scientizing jargon: para meaning deviant, philia meaning attraction). The notion is sometimes assumed to be unproblematic. The Oxford Companion to Medicine thus defines perversion as "deviant sexual behaviour, that is other than normal sexual intercourse"*.

1 If the perversions are thus assumed to be self-evident, all that would then be required would be for them to be denominated, described, docketed, condemned or exonerated, with perhaps the addition of therapeutic measures. Many influential psychiatric textbooks have followed precisely this approach. Dr. Clifford Allen's The sexual perversions and abnormalities: a study in the psychology of paraphilia, which first appeared in 1940 and was republished in various forms in the course of the next twenty years, simply lists and describes exhibitionism, fetishism, masochism, sadism and so forth, one after another like a laundry list, in a manner hardly different from Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis eighty years earlier.

2 Nowhere does Allen seriously raise the question of what actually constitutes perversion. Eustace Chesser's Sexual Behaviour, Normal and Abnormal (1949) is just the same.

3 In truth, it is peculiar that anyone could seriously imagine that the category of the perverse is incontrovertible, in view of the fact that descriptions have been changing before our very eyes. This is specially evident in the field of diagnostics. The American Psychiatric Association first published its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) in 1952. Sexual deviations, of which homosexuality was one, were there clustered with the psychopathic personality disorders — revealing, one assumes, the mid-century assumption that perversions were indicative criminal, violent and sociopathic traits. Six years later the work was revised. DSM (II) grouped sexual deviations under the less criminal-sounding classes of personality disorder, like narcissistic, hysterical and borderline. Time produced further liberalization. In the DSM (III) of 1980, and its revised version (DSM-lll-R) of 1987, sexual perversions form a class of their own under the medicalizing * This paper is the almost unrevised text of a talk given to the London Psychoanalytical Forum on June 12, 1992. 1 Walton, J., Beeson, P., Scott, R. B. (eds): Oxford companion to medicine (Oxford, New York, 1986), vol. 2., p. 1036. 2 Allen, C: The sexual perversions and abnormalities: a study in the psychology of paraphilia (London, Oxford University Press, 1940); see von Krafft-Ebing, R.: Psychopathia sexualis (Philadelphia, London: F. A. David Co., 1982; first published 1886), and the excellent recent study by Hauser, R.: Sexuality, neurasthenia and the law: Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840—1902) (Ph. D. thesis, London University, 1992). 3 Chesser, E.: Sexual behaviour, normal and abnormal (London, Medical Publications, 1949).