Perversion

Although the term perversion can refer to a variety of forms of deviation, it is most often used to describe sexual behaviors that are considered particularly abnormal, repulsive or obsessive.

Clinically exploring "a richly diversified collection of erotic endowments and inclinations: hermaphroditism, pedophilia, sodomy, fetishism, exhibitionism, sadism, masochism, coprophilia, necrophilia" among them, Freud concluded that "all humans are innately perverse".

[14] In 2015, psychoanalyst Lynn Friedman, in a review of The Complete Works of Arlene Richards in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, noted prior to that time, "virtually no analysts were writing about female perversion.

[16] Where internal controversy did arise in the liberal consensus was about the exact relation of variations to normal development—some considering in the wake of Freud that "these different sexual orientations can best be explained and understood by comparison with normal development",[17] and highlighting the fear of intimacy in perversion as "a kind of sex ... which is hedged about with special conditions ... puts a vast distance between the partners".

[18] From such a standpoint, "whatever the deviant impulse or fantasy may be, that's where the real, true, loving sexuality is hidden"[19]—a point of transition perhaps to some of the bleaker post-permissive visions of perversion.

For some participants, "Liberation, at least in its sexual form, was a new kind of imposed morality, quite as restricting" as what had gone before—one that "took very little account of the complexity of human emotional connections".

[21] In his wake, others would stress how "there is always, in any perverse act, an aspect of rape, in the sense that the Other must find himself drawn into the experience despite himself ... a loss or abandonment of subjectivity.

"[22] Similarly, object relations theory would point to the way "in perversion there is the refusal, the terror of strangeness"; to the way "the 'pervert' ... attacks imaginative elaboration through compulsive action with an accomplice; and this is done to mask psychic pain".