Fiona Ross, Pervision: A Jungian Approach
If it be not now yet it will come. ~Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 5: Scene 2
Freud uses perversion to emphasise the importance of infantile sexuality.
His two paradigms of polymorphous perversity and the Oedipus complex bind perversion to sexuality and limit perverse enactments to sexual perversions.
From this perspective, perversion is either a developmental failure in sexual development beyond the stage of polymorphous perversity, or a failure to resolve Oedipal conflicts.
The psycho-analytic interpretive tradition thereafter establishes a synonymity between the terms “perversion” and “sexual perversion”.
Despite some expansion of this interpretation, there is still a tendency for theorising about perversion to become locked in a selfreferential, rather than a deconstructive, process.
This theoretical encapsulation of the concept, with source, aim, and object entwined with sexuality, discourages attempts to incorporate broader understandings of perversion that might threaten the integrity of the traditional Freudian model. Chapter Four, which demonstrates the clarity
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and explicitness of the theory of perversion within psycho-analysis, is intended as a springboard for thinking beyond the self-enclosure of a limited sexual theory.
Although I describe how moves towards expansion have already begun in psycho-analysis, these appear to build on the implicit assumption that non-sexual perversion results from psychopathology in sexual development.
My broader theoretical model partially de-eroticises perversion by placing its root structure in more general infantile relational experience, rather than in the area of sexuality alone.
This postulation exposes an increased area of infantile vulnerability to perverse development, making perversion a more general developmental disorder.
The value of introducing a Jungian perspective to traditional theory is that it offers the possibility of a broader conceptual framework for perversion than sexuality alone.
Such a framework can incorporate a range of etiologies, psychic processes, and behavioural expressions.
The four main conceptual differences identified between psycho-analysis and analytical psychology in Chapter Six highlight restrictions in the psycho-analytic model of perversion and provide direction for expansion through reference to the Jungian concepts of psychic energy, the collective unconscious, archetypes, and teleology.
My model presents perversion as deviation from an egalitarian, dialogical, and reciprocal relationship, rather than a deviation from genital sexuality. While retaining its structure, the traditional model can be reinterpreted, with a relational rather than a sexual core.
If “relationality” (quality of communication in general) replaces “sexuality”, then whole person relationship takes the place of genital sexuality, with sexuality reinterpreted metaphorically to mean intercourse
of all kinds, both sexual and non-sexual.
Perversion is then disentangled from instinctual sexuality and becomes a persistent deviation in the aim, or from the object, of whole person relating.
In other words, the aim of perversion is not to encounter the other in a mutually satisfying way, and the object is not the other person as a whole but only particulars of the person that excite because they meet specific unconscious requirements which, if met, trigger vengeful and demeaning behaviour.
While accepting and retaining perversion as a defensive psychic structure, in my formulation the defences are functionally different.
The splitting and projection of affect and image associated with unbearable relational experience, is described as a diphasic process
moving from healthy development to psychopathology as perversion becomes established. Regression is also differently conceived, activating archetypal processes rather than relating solely to the personal unconscious.
Denial, in the form of disavowal, is reinterpreted relationally through two contradictory modes of intercourse, with apparent external conformity to the demands of relationship hiding the emotional investment in relating solely to internal reality.
The qualities of aggression and sadism are prominent in the psycho-analytic model. In the revised model they are somewhat differently conceived as operating to achieve a vengeful unconscious reversal of the relational imbalance in power, to compensate for the humiliation of early trauma.
Reaching further than the psychoanalytic model, my formulation presents such early trauma as more generally relational, thereby recognising rather than privileging sexuality.
Whereas psycho-analysis focuses on sexual ideation and behaviour, my formulation emphasises images and ideas of relational deception and developmental theft, highlighting Jung’s understanding of libido as extending beyond sexuality.
It portrays perversion as pervasive, neither inner fantasy nor outer activity, but a theme that affects the whole psyche and permeates all relationships and behaviour.
This reinterpretation more adequately addresses the range of psychic functioning and of behaviour that emanates from a perverse psychic structure and allows the terms “non-sexual perversion”, “bodily perversion”, “emotional perversion”, and “cognitive perversion”
to be subsumed under the same conceptual umbrella as sexual perversion.
This more comprehensive formulation contributes to the theoretical understanding of perversion within analytical psychology.
From a Jungian perspective, perversion is a distortion and disruption of the transcendent function, since it attacks symbolisation and obstructs the process of individuation, including healthy connectedness to the collective unconscious.
The formulation also contributes to the theoretical understanding of perversion within psychoanalysis more generally by conceptually allying sexual and non-sexual perversion and implicating early relational trauma in the onset and personal specifications of both.
This allows deceptive and destructive nonsexual activities including, for example, crimes of deception, to be considered as sometimes (but not always) emanating from a perverse psychic structure
If perversion is released from specifically sexual roots, and perverse expression is not considered as exclusively sexual, perversion as a psychopathology is open to reclassification as a subsection of
personality disorder in DSM.
This integration in psychopathology could remove some of stigma associated with the condition and help to open up treatment possibilities.
The 2006 British Psychological Society report on Understanding Personality Disorder (Alwin, Blackburn, Davidson, Hilton, Logan, & Shine, 2006) gives a general definition of personality disorder as “enduring patterns of cognition, affectivity, interpersonal behaviour and impulse control that are culturally deviant, pervasive and inflexible, and lead to distress or social impairment” (2006, pp. 5–6).
The authors conclude that most variation in personality is accounted for by the “Big Five” factors, Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism (2006, p. 7).
They cite McCrae and Costa (1995) who believe that these dimensions “represent biologically derived tendencies, which are instrumental in shaping attitudes, goals, relationships and the self-concept, and influence our interactions with the social and physical environment” (1995, p. 248) (author’s italics).
The description of the five factors places them invitingly close to archetypal predispositions. Baron-Cohen has another suggestion for reclassification in DSM.
He advocates a category of “Empathy Disorders” (Baron-Cohen, 2011, pp. 108–109).
He defines empathy as “Our ability to identify what someone else is thinking or feeling, and to respond to their thoughts and feelings with an appropriate emotion” (2011, p. 11).
This involves two stages; recognition and response.
Although he is not writing about perversion, he divides people lacking in empathy into zeropositive and zero-negative.
Whereas autism would be zero-positive, perversion would fall into the zero-negative category (which he associates with borderline personality disorder, psychopathic personality disorder, and narcissism).
The value of this approach is its emphasis on relationship rather than symptomatology.
Building on the model
This book is a small beginning. A logical next step would be empirical research offering validation, criticism, and elaboration of the theoretical formulation.
Two areas of obvious omission so far are, first, the substantiation of theoretical concepts through first-hand clinical material and, second, the subject of perverse psychopathology in women.
Although my conceptual model is applicable to women as well as men, further explanation is required to demonstrate how the perverse psychic structure in women is expressed and how it relates to both the female body and mind (Kaplan, 1991; Welldon, 1988).
Inner and Outer
I have associated perversion with lack of loving care and intimacy in early life.
However, it could be dangerous to address this particular pathology through psychotherapeutic means alone.
There need to be parallel treatment strategies for perverse behaviour, which can be destructive or dangerous and requires control, and perverse intrapsychic functioning which can only be modified by understanding and by reparative experiences of closeness, warmth, and empathy.
Re-establishment of the power and scope of a disabled transcendent
function involves the opening up and facilitating of imaginative capabilities, with recognition of a patient’s self-betrayal in sacrificing his individuation to the needs of a perversion.
A punitive approach to perversion is likely to be counter-productive since this would reinforce the perpetrator–victim experience.
Instead, as Van der Kolk and Fisher (1996, pp. 353–355) describe, successful therapy requires feelings to be aroused and assimilated within a new narrative and different models of relationship.
One area I have learned to be of inestimable value in my own practice, is patients’ reconstructions of infantile relational experiences, particularly bodily experiences such as breast feeding and skin-to-skin contact.
Other specific areas that might very profitably be addressed are the type of projection and dissociation experienced in the clinical setting, the quality of regression to the level of technical relating, and the relationship between ideation, imagery (including dream imagery), and reported or observed perverse behaviour.
Perversion creates an emotional learning plateau on which psychic processes succumb to addiction and cyclical repetition that obstructs development.
Understanding of how this cycle operates in a particular individual would help to direct psychotherapeutic intervention towards appropriate psychic exit routes.
Considered from a clinical perspective, perversion recruits a range of defence mechanisms that might be experienced transferentially, and could obstruct treatment.
These include particular types of projection and dissociation, as well as deep regression to technically based relationships that deny the other as a whole person.
At this archetypal level there is also a psychoid mirroring process, in which the collective unconscious deeply reflects the state of the psyche.
Such mirroring is beyond the personal; it inspires timeless, spaceless experiences accompanied by archetypal imagery that may present a self-portrait of the psyche’s defensive operations (Kalsched, 1996, pp. 2–5).
This book draws illustrations from biographical, rather than clinical material, that is, reported and documented behaviour rather than
observation and experience within a clinical setting.
As in psychoanalysis, I have used external behavioural patterns, including verbal behaviour, as pointers to internal states of mind and to underlying psychic structures (Grünbaum, 1986, p. 218), although I have not witnessed these behaviours first-hand.
It is therefore appropriate to consider the methodology that might be used for direct clinical investigation of some of the connections described.
A constructive method of obtaining clinical support for an expanded theory of perversion including sexual and non-sexual manifestations of a perverse psychic structure, would be the use of practitioner-based focus groups in
which analysts or psychotherapists could meet to discuss their understanding of particular patients.
Patients could be selected either on the basis of their own reported behavioural manifestations of sexual or non-sexual perversion, or through external documentation of perverse behaviour, which might arise through referral from the criminal justice system.
Such behaviour could be categorised as (a) sexual, (b) bodily, or (c) emotional or cognitive perversion.
Clinical data from patients displaying behaviour identifiable in this way could then be assessed on an ongoing basis for evidence of a perverse psychic structure.
The therapist would need to experience, within the psychotherapeutic relationship, a significant cluster of the characteristics associated with a perverse psychic structure.
The structure is described in Chapter Four as an organised system of defences involving denial, splitting, idealisation, regression or fixation, aggression and sadism, addiction and compulsion.
Consideration would need to be given as to how the presence of these qualities might be accurately detected.
The patient’s acceptance of interpretations could not be used as the criterion in the case of perverse patients as perverse psychic functioning might be associated with contra-suggestibility to interpretations (Wisdom, 1967, p. 50).
The insight or authority of the therapist might be perversely challenged due to the patient’s unconscious need to reject any attempt to engage in cooperative or fruitful interchange.
Wisdom suggests that a solution in this type of case might be for an interpretation to consist of “(i) a hypothesis about the motives contained in the patient’s associations; and (ii) a hypothesis about the defence he uses to disguise these motives” (Wisdom, 1967, p. 51).
With this consideration, each member of the practitioner group might then need to devise their own criteria for understanding that a particular patient, at some level, was acknowledging an interpretation or finding it meaningful.
A reverse approach would be identification by the therapist of perverse psychic structure, followed by recording of observed or reported perverse behaviour, identifying this as sexual, bodily, or emotional or cognitive perversion through ongoing peer group consultation.
This type of research through group assessment and discussion could provide valuable comparative data from a shared patient base and encourage the integration of theory and practice, bringing both knowledge and technique to bear on the psychic reality of perversion (Papadopoulos, 2006, pp. 9–10).
Finally, moving from the human clinical to the wider behavioural field, further comparison might be made between ritualistic behaviour in perversion and ethological studies of animal behavioural patterns such as imprinting and other attachment behaviour associated with critical periods in early development (Burkhardt, 2005).
A comparison of the critical imagery of innate release mechanisms in animals, and the imagery and ideation triggering action-specific perverse behaviour in humans, might illuminate the role of archetypal, species-specific factors. ~Fiona Ross, PERVERSION:
A JUNGIAN APPROACH, Page 123-129
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