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

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

on the path towards the final sexual aim ", inevitably carried with that the whiff of perversion.

22 Freud combined, rather uneasily, a deep if concealed libertarianism with a strong commitment to psychosexual normalcy and health. Perhaps studiously ambiguous, his language betrays an aura of contradiction. In the Three Essays, he states that it is inappropriate to use the word "perversion" as a "term of reproach "P In the case of Dora, however, published in the same year, he refers to fellatio as "excessively repulsive and perverted", while immediately asserting that "we must learn to speak without indignation of what we call the sexual perversions "?

4 His famous letter of 1935 to the mother of an American homosexual •— a sermon against judgmentalism — maintains that "Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, nor vice, no degradation, it cannot be classified as an illness; we consider it to be a variation of the sexual function produced by a certain arrest of sexual development ".

25 Freud, Jerome Neu has noted, never speaks in his own voice about "unnatural" forms of sexuality.

26 We side with Freud in his demolition of the question-begging and spurious discourse of degenerationism. But did not Freud enmesh sexual thinking in a different trap? In reference to the perversions, he erected a teleology that presented mature sexuality as the renunciation of infantile sexuality. Freud's thinking, Sulloway has justly argued, always retained the remnants of developmental, evolutionary biology, echoing the notion, associated with Ernst Haeckel and other German evolutionists, that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.

27 In his theory of perversion, Freud never shed his biologistic blinkers. Discussing perversions, Freud showed remarkably little receptivity to the possibility that their history should be viewed not as objectively arrested psychic development but as socially delineated, the products of culturally-enforced normative boundaries, upheld by disapproval and disgust, by pulpit, press, police and prison. If they are socially conceived, perversions may be understood as taking their pattern and meaning from taboos and transgression. To note this lacuna is not to expect Freud to have been Norbert Elias, with his sociological notion, set out in The Civilizing Process, of a shifting "threshold of shame and embarrassment ";

28 nor to have been Georges Bataille, with his embracing of the perverse as the violation of the sacred;

29 nor for that matter to have been Mikhail Bahktin, with his Freud, S.: Three contributions to the theory of sex. I. The sexual aberrations, (1901—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. 149—150. Freud, S.: Three essays on the theory of sexuality, p. 160. Freud, S.: 'Fragment of the analysis of a case of hysteria" [Dora], 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, p. 52, 50. Jones, E.: The life and work of Sigmund Freud, vol. 3. The last phase 1919—1939 (New York, Basic Books, 1957), pp. 208—209. Neu, J.: "Freud and perversion", in Neu, J. (ed), The Cambridge companion to Freud (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 175—208,202. Sulloway, F.: Freud, biologist of the mind, o. c. 199f. Elias, N.: The civilizing process, vol. 1, The history of manners (New York, Pantheon, 1978); vol. 2, Power and civility (New York, Pantheon, 1982); vol. 3, The court society (New York, Pantheon, 1983); for evaluation see Mennell, S.: Norbert Elias: civilization and the human self-image (Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1989). Bataille, G.: Death and sensuality: a study of eroticism and the taboo (New York, Ballantine, 1962).