Magyar László szerk.: Orvostörténeti közlemények 166-169. (Budapest, 1999)
TANULMÁNYOK — ARTICLES - Porter, Roy: Perversion in the past. — Perverzió a múltban
tainly the expression of a morbidity of the nervous system. In these cases we have almost always to deal with an inherited neuropathic and psychopathic constitution. The inversion that is to say, the error — in the nervous system of a woman whose body is masculine, and vice versa ... is undoubtedly a congenital condition. This statement is especially confirmed by those inverted males or females who have some of the bodily features of the opposite sex. We may hold that in these cases either the embryonal hermaphroditism is transformed into more or less complete somatic mono-sexuality, but with an opposite psychic monosexuality remaining, or at a somewhat more advanced stage it stops at psychosensory hermaphroditism ". 14 As may be seen, pseudo-scientific jargon was being freely invented and invoked to shore up the indispensable but elusive notion of the perverse. Perversion was construed in terms of psychopathy, though Bianchi admitted that not every pervert was a psychopath. Thus, as Foucault and many other historians have insisted, developments after 1850 gave a new scientific footing to what remained essentially the ancient distinction between procreative and non-procreative sex, and shifted from condemnation of one-off unnatural acts (classically sodomy) to the new categories of the perversions and their perpetrator, the pervert. 15 The change had much to do with professional empire-building by psycho-sexual specialists, insisting (however odd though this may seem) their new knowledge was enlightening, liberating and destigmatizing. The notion of pervert was coined as a counterpart to the invert, forerunner of the homosexual. For all sorts of personal, social, historical and clinical reasons, it was homosexuality that claimed pride of place amongst these theorists. But what the perversions lacked in consequence, they made up for in sheer multiplicity and exotic appeal. From Krafft-Ebing to the present, nothing has remotely rivalled the perversions for gratifying psychiatric prurience. The story of the psychiatrization of the vita sexualis might have stopped there: indeed, as I have hinted, it is possible to read the sexual zoos depicted by quite modern authors like Chesser or Allen and feel trapped in fin de siècle Vienna or Milan. Evidently the natural history approach to perversions satisfies a deep desire for a (pseudo-) medical nosology and taxonomy, a scheme distinguishing the alien by means of an idiom carrying the ring of science, empiricism and objectivity. The reason why matters did not rest there lies with Freud. The big question of Freud's originality — is he best seen essentially as the child of late-nineteenth century evolutionary biology and neurophysiology? — has been fiercely debated by Frank Sulloway, Jeffrey Masson and many others: I cannot air these general issues here. 16 But what is abundantly clear is that Freud, with a little help from his friend, Wilhelm Fliess, advanced a radically different way of theorizing perversion — and inversion for that matter. Drawing on his concepts of the unconscious, of innate bisexuality and infantile sexuality, Freud framed a developmental theory of perversion. In the beginning, he argued in his Three Essays on the Theoty of Sexuality (1905), infancy is the state of the polymorphously perverse; born to what Jonathan Dollimore felicitously terms "original perverse plenitude", the infant is Bianchi, L.: A text-book of psychiatry (London, Baillière, Tindall and Cox), p. 668. Foucault, M.: The history of sexuality, p. 43. A superb appraisal of the modern critique of Freud is offered in Robinson, P.: Freud and his critics (Berkeley/Los Angeles/Oxford, University of California Press, 1993).
