Questions & Quotes

826 - “Perversion in the context of multiplicity and discontinuity is a discursive construct that, when examined, begins to fall apart so that we must wonder: why do we still talk about it?”827 - “Perversion may be defined, after all, as the sex that you like and I don’t.”833 - “The analyst needs her theory of perversion (if this is a concept she requires in order to think about sexuality), but she also needs to know both what she feels about perversion—its affective meaning to her and the values embedded in that meaning—and what those perverse practices mean to her patients.”857 - “What, after all, is pathology? If perversion can coexist with health, if its status as illness varies with cultural time and place, then, conversely, any sexuality may be symptomatic—or healthy. If all sexualities may claim wholesomeness, if all have a valid psychic place, then all are subject to the same psychic vicissitudes. Put yet another way, sexuality has nothing inherently to do with mental health or mental illness.” Questions: Why has perversion played such a strong role in psychoanalytic work? Why did Freud focus so much on normativity and non-normativity? Why sex? If sex has nothing to do with mental health, then what relationship does psychoanalysis have to sex?