Download or read book What are Perversions written by Sergio Benvenuto and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-05-08 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores what we mean when we use the term "perversion." Are we dealing with a sexological classification, a mental disturbance, an ethical deviation, a hedonistic style, or an historical-cultural artifact? The book retraces some of the fundamental stages in the field of psychoanalytic thought-from Freud to Masud Khan, Stoller, and Lacan-and proposes an original approach: that "paraphilias" today are taken as an ethical failure of the sexual relationship with the other. The perversions signal a specific relationship with the other, who is treated not simply as a sexual object, but someone whose subjectivity is ably exploited precisely in order to get a perverse pleasure. Acts, if considered perverse, are understood as a metaphorical re-edition of a trauma, above all sexual, in which the subject (as a child) suffered the bitter experience of exclusion or jealousy.
Download or read book Perversion written by Robert J. Stoller and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-05-30 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book focuses on the subject of the development of masculinity and femininity. It shows that the perverse scene aims not only at denying castration, but also at securing a more solid basis for a jeopardized sexual identity.
Download or read book Female Perversions written by Louise J. Kaplan and published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. This book was released on 1997 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Louise J. Kaplan challenges the traditional view that perversion represents deviant sexual behavior in this "fascinating and ambitious new study".--The New York Times Book Review. "This masterful study breaks new ground in our understanding of sexuality, gender roles and the way modern society trivializes erotic expression".--Publishers Weekly.
Download or read book The Age of Perversion written by Danielle Knafo and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-01 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American Board and Academy of Psychoanalysis Book Prize Winner for 2018 (Theoretical Category) We have entered the age of perversion, an era in which we are becoming more like machines and they more like us.The Age of Perversion explores the sea changes occurring in sexual and social life, made possible by the ongoing technological revolution, and demonstrates how psychoanalysts can understand and work with manifestations of perversion in clinical settings. Until now theories of perversion have limited their scope of inquiry to sexual behavior and personal trauma. The authors of this book widen that inquiry to include the social and political sphere, tracing perversion’s existential roots to the human experience of being a conscious animal troubled by the knowledge of death. Offering both creative and destructive possibilities, perversion challenges boundaries and norms in every area of life and involves transgression, illusion casting, objectification, dehumanization, and the radical quest for transcendence. This volume presents several clinical cases, including a man who lived with and loved a sex doll, a woman who wanted to be a Barbie doll, and an Internet sex addict. Also examined are cases of widespread social perversion in corporations, the mental health care industry, and even the government. In considering the continued impact of technology, the authors discuss how it is changing the practice of psychotherapy. They speculate about what the future may hold for a species who will redefine what it means to be human more in the next few decades than during any other time in human history. The Age of Perversion provides a novel examination of the convergence of perversion and technology that will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists, social workers, mental health counselors, sex therapists, sexologists, roboticists, and futurists, as well as social theorists and students and scholars of cultural studies.
Download or read book Perversion written by Stephanie S. Swales and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-08-21 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lacan's psychoanalytic take on what makes a pervert perverse is not the fact of habitually engaging in specific "abnormal" or transgressive sexual acts, but of occupying a particular structural position in relation to the Other. Perversion is one of Lacan's three main ontological diagnostic structures, structures that indicate fundamentally different ways of solving the problems of alienation, separation from the primary caregiver, and castration, or having limits set by the law on one's jouissance. The perverse subject has undergone alienation but disavowed castration, suffering from excessive jouissance and a core belief that the law and social norms are fraudulent at worst and weak at best. In Perversion, Stephanie Swales provides a close reading (a qualitative hermeneutic reading) of what Lacan said about perversion and its substructures (i.e., fetishism, voyeurism, exhibitionism, sadism, and masochism). Lacanian theory is carefully explained in accessible language, and perversion is elucidated in terms of its etiology, characteristics, symptoms, and fundamental fantasy. Referring to sex offenders as a sample, she offers clinicians a guide to making differential diagnoses between psychotic, neurotic, and perverse patients, and provides a treatment model for working with perversion versus neurosis. Two detailed qualitative clinical case studies are presented—one of a neurotic sex offender and the other of a perverse sex offender—highlighting crucial differences in the transference relation and subsequent treatment recommendations for both forensic and private practice contexts. Perversion offers a fresh psychoanalytic approach to the subject and will be of great interest to scholars and clinicians in the fields of psychoanalysis, psychology, forensic science, cultural studies, and philosophy.
Download or read book The Language of Perversion and the Language of Love written by Sheldon Bach and published by Jason Aronson. This book was released on 1999-01-28 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From long before the Trojan War to the ethnic cleansings of our own century, people have often used their potential to treat other human beings as things. It is this treatment of another person as a thing rather than as a human being that the eminent psychoanalyst, Dr. Sheldon Bach, sees as a perversion of object relationships and that forms the background of this powerful book. Perversion is a lack of capacity for whole object love, and while this includes the sexual perversions it also includes certain character perversions, character disorders and psychotic conditions. Dr. Bach's clinical work has led him to conclude that sexual perversions are generally inconsistent with whole object love. Therapeutic experience suggests that the pathways to object love may be strewn with outgrown and discarded sexual perversions. But whether a sexual perversion per se exists or not, the issue of how it happens that one person can degrade another to the status of a thing is an issue of importance not only for the psychoanalysis of character but for our larger understanding of human nature as well. Perversions are attempts to simplistically resolve or defend against some of the central paradoxes of human existence. How is it possible for us to be born of someone's flesh yet be separate from them, or to live in one's own experience yet observe oneself from the outside? How are we able to deal with feelings of being both male and female, child and adult, or to negotiate between the worlds of internal and external stimulation? People with perversions have special difficulty in dealing with the ambiguity of human relationships. They have not developed the transitional psychic space that would allow them to contain paradox, making it difficult for them to recognize the reality and legitimacy of multiple points of view. Thus they tend to think in either/or dichotomies, to search for dominant/submissive relationships and to perceive the world from idiosyncratically subjective or coldly objective perspectives. In this
Download or read book The Problem of Perversion written by Arnold Goldberg and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1995-01-01 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Perverse sexual behavior--from mild variations on heterosexual activity to fetishism to cross-dressing--is usually linked to sexual and/or aggressive conflicts in childhood. In this book, Dr. Arnold Goldberg explains and interprets perverse behavior in a different way, by drawing on concepts of psychoanalytic self psychology, a variant of psychoanalysis that originated with Dr. Heinz Kohut and that concentrates on the self as a psychological structure. Psychoanalytic self psychology, says Dr. Goldberg, makes disorders of perversion more understandable and more accessible to treatment. Dr. Goldberg expands the definition of perversion, claiming that it is based on three essential components: sexualization (as distinct from sexuality); vertical splitting (where perverse action resides in the split-off part of the self and the other sector of the self, which knows right from wrong, is temporarily stilled); and psychological family dynamics. Dr. Goldberg explains each of these three dimensions and provides a number of illustrations. He also discusses the possibility of interpreting homosexuality as a compensatory structure, the relation of hostility to perversion, types of perverse behavior that are readily treatable, and the reasonable goals of such treatment.
Download or read book Perversion written by Prof. Lisa Downing and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-04-24 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Perversion - its ubiquity in infantile life and its persistence in the psychical and sexual lives of some adults - was a central element of Freud's lifelong work. The problem of perversion has since been revisited by many psychoanalytic schools with the result that Freud's original view of perversion has been replaced by numerous - often contradictory - perspectives on its aetiology, development and treatment. The concept of perversion has also been significant for the disciplines of cultural studies and gender and queer theory, which have explored the creative and dissident powers of perversion, while expressing a suspicion of its operation as a pathological category. This bi-partite collection offers a series of perspectives on perversion by a range of psychoanalytic practitioners and theorists (edited by Dany Nobus), and a selection of papers by scholars who work with, or critique, psychoanalytic theories of perversion (edited by Lisa Downing). It stages a serious dialogue between psychoanalysis and its commentators on the controversial issue of non-normative sexuality.
Download or read book Perversions and Near perversions in Clinical Practice written by Gerald I. Fogel and published by . This book was released on 1991 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The traditional psychoanalytical definition of perversion stresses deviant behaviour, including such categories as transvestism, fetishism, sexual sado-masochism, exhibitionism, voyeurism, paedophilia, and bestiality. However, as Freud noted, there are polymorphous perverse elements in everyone's sexual fantasies and behaviours, and the line between normality and abnormality is difficult to draw. In this book prominent psychoanalysts present the latest psychoanalytic perpectives on the perverse, expanding the definition to behaviours that are not overtly sexual and at the same time defining perversion more specifically.
Download or read book Alienation in Perversions written by Masud Khan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-03-22 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Perversions and borderline states were, by accident of fate, Masud Khan's chief preoccupation in his clinical work during the last three decades of his life. In an earlier volume, The Privacy of the Self, he presented what he called the natural and private crystallization of his experience with his patients and teachers; notably, in the latter category, Anna Freud, John Rickman and D.W. Winnicott. In this later book he takes his cue from Freud who, as he says, diagnosed the sickness of Western Judaeo-Christian cultures in terms of "the person alienated from himself". Masud Khan's basic argument, succinctly stated in his Preface, is that "the pervert puts an impersonal object between his desire and his accomplice. This object can be a stereotype fantasy, a gadget or a pornographic image. All three alienate the pervert from himself, as, alas, from the object of desire".With its wealth of clinical and theoretical insights, Masud Khan's Alienation in Perversions makes a major contribution to our understanding of perversion formation.
Download or read book The World of Perversion written by James Penney and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The World of Perversion, James Penney argues that antihomophobic criticism has nothing to lose—and indeed everything to gain—by reclaiming the psychoanalytic concept of perversion as psychic structure. Analyzing the antagonism between psychoanalytic approaches to perversion and those inspired by the work of Michel Foucault, Penney explores how different assumptions about sexuality have determined the development of contemporary queer theory, and how the universalizing approach to homosexuality in psychoanalysis actually leads to more useful political strategies for nonheterosexual subjects. Having established this theoretical context, Penney focuses on works by Georges Bataille, Blaise Pascal, Denis Diderot, and Jacques Lacan, tracing the implications of various sexual and moral understandings of the term perversion, and illustrating how a psychoanalytic approach to the question of perversion enables politicized readings that are foreclosed by a Foucauldian methodology.
Download or read book Perversion written by Claire Pajaczkowska and published by Totem Books. This book was released on 2000 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whilst Freud clearly intended the psychoanalytic term "perversion" to be from the moral judgement that the world carries in colloquial use, its relationship to feelings of contempt, triumph, sexual excitement and to shame, revulsion and fear, necessarily make it a troubling concept. To what extent is moral panic about homosexuality and perversion a hysterical outburst from a fragile "normality"? The liberalisation of the legal status of homosexuality in Britain and the USA has encouraged attempts to recast perversion as "neo-sexualities" or as Foucauldian' "Queer Theory". As perversion is both a form of sexuality and a form of thinking or belief, it is ubiquitous, in sublimated forms, in the culture surrounding us. It is also a universal component of human sexuality. Having explained the original Freudian concept and the extent to which it is currently used as a diagnostic term, the author goes on to discuss how it can be used in the analysis of contemporary culture and everyday life.
Download or read book Political Perversion written by Joshua Gunn and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "When Trump became president, much of the country was repelled by what they saw as the vulgar spectacle of his ascent, the perversion of the highest office in the land. In his bold, groundbreaking book Political Perversion, rhetorician Joshua Gunn argues that this "mean-spirited turn" in American politics (of which Trump is the paragon) is best understood as a structural perversion enhanced primarily by the speed of communication technologies. Drawing on insights from critical theory, media ecology, and psychoanalysis, Gunn argues that perverse rhetorics dominate not only the political sphere but also our daily interactions with others, in person and online. From sexting to campaign rhetoric, Gunn shows how technology has changed our ways of relating (and not relating) to others and has engendered infantile and sadistic forms of provocation and enjoyment. In this book, Trump is only the tip of a sinister, rapidly growing iceberg, one to which we ourselves unwittingly contribute on a daily basis"--
Download or read book Perversion written by Fiona Ross and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-04-17 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Theoretical understanding of perversion is neglected in analytical psychology, and narrowly developed in psychoanalysis, where it traditionally refers to sexual perversion. Etymological exploration of the word "perversion", including its use in religious, moral, sociological and legal contexts, reveals a wider meaning than that adopted in psychoanalysis. The aim of the author is to revise the psychoanalytic model through the introduction of Jungian concepts that extend the understanding of perversion beyond the bounds of sexuality to a more general relational context. By describing the development of psychoanalytic thinking on perversion in detail, the author is able to highlight the central differences between the Freudian and Jungian interpretive traditions and to explain why Jungian ideas on perversion have remained underdeveloped, leading to the absence of a unique or available Jungian contribution to the theory of perversion.
Download or read book Perversion and Utopia written by Joel Whitebook and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1996-10-31 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this sweeping challenge to the postmodern critiques of psychoanalysis, Joel Whitebook argues for a reintegration of Freud's uncompromising investigation of the unconscious with the political and philosophical insights of critical theory. Perversion and Utopia follows in the tradition of Herbert Marcuse's Eros and Civilization and Paul Ricoeur's Freud and Philosophy. It expands on these books, however, because of the author's remarkable grasp not only of psychoanalytic studies but also of the contemporary critical climate; Whitebook, a philosopher and a psychoanalyst, writes with equal facility on both Habermas and Freud. A central thesis of Perversion and Utopia is that there is an essential affinity between the utopian impulse and the perverse impulse, in that both reflect a desire to bypass the reality principle that Freud claimed to define the human condition. The book explores the positive and negative aspects of the relationship between these impulses, which are ubiquitous features of human life, and the requirements of civilized social existence. Whitebook steers a course between orthodox psychoanalytic conservatism, which seeks simply to repress the perverse-utopian impulse in the name of social continuity and cohesion, and those forms of Freudo-Marxism, postmodernism, and psychoanalytic feminism that advocate its direct and full expression in the name of emancipation. While he demonstrates the limitations of the current textual approaches to Freud, especially those influenced by Lacan, Whitebook also enlists the lessons of psychoanalysis to counteract the excessive rationalism of the Habermasian brand of critical theory, thus making a substantial contribution to current discussions within critical theory itself. His analysis and interpretation of perversion, narcissism, sublimation, and ego bring new insight to these central and thorny issues in Freud, and his discussions of Adorno, Marcuse, Castoriadis, Habermas, Ricoeur, Lacan, and others are equally penetrating.
Download or read book Lacan on Psychosis written by Jon Mills and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-09-21 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first book of its kind that attempts to distill Lacan’s views on psychosis for both a specialized and non-specialized audience. An attempt is made to present Lacan’s unorganized theories to apply to conceptual paradigms in psychoanalysis and the humanities as well as applied clinical practice. This effort is in the spirit of fostering dialogue and educating different theoretical orientations within psychoanalysis on what Lacan and his followers have contributed to emerging contemporary perspectives on psychotic phenomena in both normative and pathological populations. Within Lacanian circles there is debate over what constitutes psychosis, including defining the ordinary from pathological variants that have historically defined the phenomena as a mental illness. Here psychosis is not defined by hegemonic authoritarian psychiatry, but rather as a conceptual framework or philosophical perspective supported by descriptive narrative and symptomatic phenomenology that challenges preconceived notions of what we typically consider psychosis to entail. In this book a variety of perspectives are presented by internationally respected scholars and clinicians who examine what Lacan had to say about psychosis, from his nuanced theories represented in select texts, including omissions, extrapolations, and new applications, as well as how clinical methodology and technique have been adapted and advanced by practitioners treating psychotic individuals. Lacan on Psychosis will be of interest to academics, scholars, researchers, and practitioners in the fields of psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, philosophy, cultural theory, the humanities, and the behavioral sciences.
Download or read book The Book of Minor Perverts written by Benjamin Kahan and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2019-02-05 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shortlisted for the Modernist Studies Assocation Book Prize Statue-fondlers, wanderlusters, sex magicians, and nymphomaniacs: the story of these forgotten sexualities—what Michel Foucault deemed “minor perverts”—has never before been told. In The Book of Minor Perverts, Benjamin Kahan sets out to chart the proliferation of sexual classification that arose with the advent of nineteenth-century sexology. The book narrates the shift from Foucault’s “thousand aberrant sexualities” to one: homosexuality. The focus here is less on the effects of queer identity and more on the lines of causation behind a surprising array of minor perverts who refuse to fit neatly into our familiar sexual frameworks. The result stands at the intersection of history, queer studies, and the medical humanities to offer us a new way of feeling our way into the past.
