In addition, because I do not believe that the technical language of psychoanalysis is usually necessary, the reader may miss the weightier quality present in analytic discussions of sexuality. I do not believe, however, that an author has said anything more when he habitually uses words like “cathexis,” “narcissism,” or “neutralization.” Important psychological issues can usually be accurately expressed in ordinary language, with the added advantage that any weakness in the argument or data is more visible to both author and reader when the tone is informal.
Because I believe this, I also believe psychoanalysts, when dealing with clinical matters, should write—at the same time—for analysts and for others. (Freud is the model.) It forces one to be clearer. Problems in analytic theory that we cannot make most competent and motivated people understand probably cannot be made clear to our fellow analysts either. (The disadvantage herein is that at times I have had to review for the nonanalyst subjects every analyst knows well and have also in a few places referred to work of analysts that will be unfamiliar to some nonanalysts. I have tried to keep those paragraphs few and short.)
Another reason for writing about perversion rather than the perversions is my belief that to attempt the latter would be premature. Although there are compendia of bizarre cases, the emphasis in these works has been on superficial case reports with a buckshot spray of etiological theories, veneered with pseudoscience. The theoretical discussions give too many glib answers, and even the case material, at first glance so detailed, is superficial, incomplete, inaccurate. Keeping that in mind, I shall not take up all the aberrations but shall consider a specific condition in detail only to illustrate hypotheses.
I hope, then, that this book will induce readers to check if in truth there is not this lack of information, in the hope that some of those who recognize it will be encouraged toward further study. For there appears to be an odd situation regarding research in aberrant sexual behavior: the relative absence of discussion in recent years gives the impression that not much is left to be done. Extended case material is rarely published in the psychiatric or psychoanalytic literature, as if the criteria for diagnoses were clear-cut, the nature of the syndromes so evident that detailed descriptions were quaint, no longer necessary. (Perhaps too many professionals feel that the studies early in the century by such workers as Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis have given us a surfeit of description.) The analytic literature rarely reports on syndromes other than homosexuality and fetishism. The two or three papers that appear each year too often (though with a few wonderful exceptions) just rework a prior theoretical position. Would it not be better to publicize our ignorance so that we can move ahead in our understanding of sexual behavior?
We have a start at remedying this if we separate out those sexual aberrations produced primarily as a lifelong attempt to “cure” certain psychic stress from those in which that dynamic is not at the root of the behavior; I believe that perversion, but not all aberration, is a product of anxiety and that perverse sexual behavior has sprinkled through it remnants, ruins, and other indicators of the past history of one’s libidinal development, especially in the dynamics of one’s family. If the observer knew everything that had happened in the life of the person he is studying, he would find these historical events represented in the details of the manifest sexual act. The observer would then know when and why this person gave up what he would have most liked erotically, to choose the alternatives that are the perversion’s scenario. This hypothesis, then, is that the perversion is a fantasy put into action—a defensive structure raised gradually over the years in order to preserve erotic pleasure. The desire to preserve that gratification comes from two main sources: (1) extreme physical pleasure which by its very nature demands repetition; (2) a need to maintain identity.
I do not see how fantasy can be left out of one’s calculations about human sexual behavior; it is no secret that fantasy, in the form of daydreams, is present consciously in much of sexual activity. In fact, on hearing of a person without sexual fantasy, we suspect that an inhibition is in force. But run through the names of the great researchers on sexuality of the past generation or more. You will note that no matter what area they study, or what techniques they use, or what findings they report, they have produced data of sexual aberrance not motivated by fantasy, that is, not motivated by storytelling that fashions a new, better “reality.” These workers emphasize the noninvented, nonconflictual, extrapsychic origins of sexual excitement, whether perverse or not. They treat intrapsychic manifestations as if not there. Example: a handful of cases have been found in the whole immense universe of man in which aberrant sexual behavior was set off by a CNS seizure; conclusion: perversion is the result of epilepsy. Example: free-ranging animals occasionally use a component of the reproductive behavior of the opposite sex, as when a cow mounts another cow momentarily; conclusion: homosexuality is part of animal activity, and man, being part of the animal world, is only expressing his natural inheritance when he is homosexual. Example: a male chimpanzee in New Orleans masturbates while fondling a boot; conclusion: fetishism is the result of simple conditioning. Example: certain societies consider as nonperverse, sexual activity we define as perverse; conclusion: the act, performed in our society with the same anatomy, has the same meaning to the individual and springs from the same psychic sources as in the alien culture.
And on and on. Such studies unite in an effort to disprove psychic motivation by substituting primeval forces like evolution, chromosomal and genetic inheritance, neurophysiology, and conditioning and imprinting that act on a defenseless psychobiology, or by proclaiming that normative is normal. I disagree, but I do believe these factors are (or in some cases yet unproved, may be) essential inputs to human sexuality. I ask only that we also reckon with the intrapsychic effects of a person’s past, especially as expressed in the subtleties of interpersonal relationships. Those who consider themselves scientists may be making a historic mistake in avoiding this factor. They do not know that what is labeled one’s behavior is actually also one's explanations. Its complexity at present puts the mind beyond the grasp of experimental techniques; research methods of the scientific establishment are not yet competent to reveal or probe fantasy. But if fantasy exists, it can be studied. And while we wait for science to catch up, perhaps we should turn to that uncertain and yet powerful technique of discovery, the psychoanalytic method, and its bemused offspring, analytic theory.
The goal of my research is to find psychological origins for what I have labeled “gender identity,” that is, masculinity and femininity. For doing so, there seem to be three methods in which analysts are most skilled. (i) Analyze adults and children to glimpse roots of their behavior. For generations this has been the source of analysts’ insights; the perspective is primarily intrapsychic (ego, superego, id; conscious, preconscious, unconscious; fixation and regression; defense mechanisms; fantasy; and the like). Let us hope, however, that Freud’s analogy of the analyst searching the past like an archaeologist does not encourage anyone to be satisfied that a psychoanalysis tells us all we need to know of the past. If you had a chance and you were a historian, would you prefer to pick over the ruins or visit the living city? So we should also (2) observe mothers with their children, plus fathers, plus the family interacting; such studies in the past generation have tested and expanded the findings from (1). (3) Analyze the parents, especially mothers, of the people whose behavior is the object of our research; in the past dozen years, after some years with only the first two, I have concentrated on this last method for the insight it gives into the pressures brought to bear on the child who is to become aberrant. (My colleagues treat the child and one of the parents while I analyze the other parent.)