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

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

label, paraphilia. In the latter, oral and anal intercourse and homosexuality have ceased to be paraphilias. Why? In large part because in 1975 the American Psychiatric Association held an epoch-making postal ballot on the subject, whose result led to homosexuality being struck off the list of psychiatric disorders.

4 Under such circumstances, with disease being democratized and perversions defined by polls, there appear to be two possible strategies. The whole embarrassing affair of sexual abnormalities may be consigned to silence. Thus John G. Howells and M. Livia Osborn's A Reference Companion to the History of Abnormal Psychology (1984), a bulky, two-volume reference work, has no entry at all under "Perversion". Alternatively, attempts may be made to update categories and theories, as staple perversions — fellatio, cunnilingus, homosexuality — lose their aura of disgust, while fears grow in our violent and menacing times about the perils of other forms of (mainly male) sexual behaviour — paedophilia, sadism, necrophilia. As allegations mount about infantile sexual abuse and feminist agitation, works like Louise J. Kaplan's Female Perversions (1991) continue to uphold "perversions" as a valid and legitimate category. Kaplan contends that perverse sexual acts — acts, she says, characterized by "desperation and fixity" — betray underlying psychopathologies. "A perversion is performed"

, she explains, "by a person who has no other choices, a person who would otherwise be overwhelmed by anxieties or depression of psychosis ". Perversions are viewed by Kaplan as symptomatic of male psychopathology: In a male perversion, the strategy admits into consciousness a defensive, phallicnarcissistic exaggeration of masculinity: most males feel elated, alive, energized, and proud of themselves when they are conforming to this prevalent social stereotype of masculinity. It is the special strategy of male perversion to permit a person to express his forbidden and shameful feminine wishes by disguising them in an ideal of masculinity. Macho genital prowess and the impersonation of fantasized, idealized males are hiding places for the man's humiliating feminine strivings.

5 In male deviants, in other words, perversion is an attempt to express, yet deny, underlying and unacceptable urges to be feminine. This may seem a convoluted view — though it is hardly odder than Freud's notorious notion that a fetish object is a substitute for the mother's penis — but it is surely symptomatic of an era when gender roles are under stress and the understanding of sexuality has been thoroughly politicized. Present confusions about the categories of the perverse point to the need for historical inquiry: when, how and why did the notion of perversion originate? What dilemmas was the term expected to resolve? Was perversion ever an agreed category, or has it always been contested? The idea of the perverse and the pervert, it is well known, was first formulated as a complement to the idea of the inverse and the invert (that is, homosexual) in the decades 4 For the preceding, see Kaplan, L. J.: Female perversions (London, Pandora Press, 1991), 12f. and Merck, M.: Perversions. Deviant readings (London, Virago, 1993), 13f.; Merck's book is illuminating on many of the issues covered in this paper. For the American Psychiatric Association, see Bayer, R.: Homosexuality and American psychiatry (New York, Basic Books, 1981; Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1987). " Kaplan, L. J.: Female perversions, p. 12. To my mind, Kaplan's views represent the worst fusion of psychoanalytic and feminist jargon. f) Apter, E. S.: Feminizing the fetish: psychoanalysis and narrative obsession in turn-of-the-century France (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 35.