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This article analyses the slippery notions of the normal and normality in select works of Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840–1902) and Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) and argues that homosexuality became a ‘boundary object’ between the normal and the abnormal in their works. Constructing homosexuality as ‘normal enough’ provided these two key thinkers of the fin de siècle with an opportunity to challenge societal and medical norms: Krafft-Ebing did this through mapping perversions; Freud, by challenging perceived norms about sexual development more broadly. The article submits that the scientific logic presented in Krafft-Ebing’s seminal case study compilation Psychopathia Sexualis and Freud’s early theoretical writings and cases, including Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), was itself haunted by notions of norms and the normal that were not always easy to resolve, and sometimes involved a certain amount of inspired conjecture on the part of both thinkers in order to develop and validate their differing tripartite models of normality. Krafft-Ebing imagined homosexuality as a variation of the normal by generalizing a gay male experience. He also recorded the obstreperous cases of homosexual women based largely inside the clinic but by and large ignored this evidence. Freud inextricably bound homosexuality to normality (and vice versa) by redefining homosexuals as a group to include individuals with unconscious same-sex desire. Doing so allowed him to conceptualize the fear of homosexuality as crucial in the formation of neurosis and psychosis, and at the same time put him at odds with relevant early identity politics.

Paul expresses the common Jewish view that same-sex relations typify the depravity of the non-Jewish world, primarily as a means of finding common ground with those who would be listening to his letter and to argue that sins by his own Jewish people, though different, are no less deplorable and conclude that therefore both need Christ’s redemption. Assuming God created humans male and female, he finds the roots of such behavior in distorted minds and passions resulting from distorted understandings of God.

A conceptual evolution is traceable from early modern classifications of libido nefanda (execrable lust) to early nineteenth-century allusions to ‘perversion of the sexual instinct’, via pluralizing notions of coitus nefandus/sodomiticus in Martin Schurig’s work, and of sodomia impropria in seventeenth- through late eighteenth-century legal medicine. Johann Valentin Müller’s early breakdown of various unnatural penchants seemingly inspired similar lists in works by Johann Christoph Fahner and Johann Josef Bernt, and ultimately Heinrich Kaan. This allows an ante-dating of the ‘specification of the perverted’ (Foucault) often located in the late nineteenth century, and appreciation of pygmalionism and necrophilia as instances of ‘perverted sexual instinct’. In this light, Kaan’s early psychopathia sexualis was less innovative and more ambivalent than previously thought.

The ostensibly bizarre crime of braid-cutting invited occasional alienist inferences from the late 1850s onwards, until it entered mid-1880s police profiles and forensic-psychiatric taxonomies as a corollary of perversion, specifically sadism and fetishism. Cases were rare, but were reported as late as the mid-1930s and enduringly cited as encompassing a staple variety of fetishism. This note briefly reconstructs entries in German, French and English forensic psychiatry, sexual psychopathology and psychoanalysis.

Although there is an extensive psychoanalytic literature on perversion, and numerous articles about creativity, few authors have explored relations between creativity and perversion. In particular, the role of childhood trauma and its impact on object relations has not been examined in patients with perversions whose creativity is blocked. In association with preoedipal anxieties and fantasies, childhood trauma can not only contribute to the development of perversion, but can also inhibit or distort the creative process by establishing an inner world characterized by the presence of a threatening internal bad object and the elusiveness of an internal good object. Though it is essential to help these patients establish an identification with the phallic father, an internal good maternal object, in the form of a muse, needs to be retrieved to bring inspiration and reduce the anxieties generated by an internal bad object, thereby facilitating the pursuit of authentic creative work. A detailed case report illustrates how this theoretical perspective guided the treatment approach to a male patient with macrophilia who was struggling to realize his creative potential.

The concept of affirmative consent presumes a subject who is fully transparent to herself and who can anticipate the precise effects of her assent. This essay proposes limit consent, a concept that offers us different ways to think about the sexual—and about the analytic encounter. Limit consent involves a more nuanced negotiation of limits and becomes possible when the subject makes herself passible (Lyotard 1988) to an other—a condition that is neither active nor passive. Processes described in depth here suggest that passibility has ties to the rousing of infantile sexuality (Freud) and to the subject’s normative perversity (Laplanche). When the psychic economy of the infantile sexual is followed to its apex, a particular kind of state is produced that I call overwhelm—a word that is used here as a noun. Overwhelm is a state of dysregulation that can be confused with, but is not the same as, repetition compulsion. Overwhelm entails risk, and under some circumstances it may open up space toward significant psychic transformations. A detailed clinical example illustrates how overwhelm may make itself known in the clinical encounter, and how it can infiltrate the transference/countertransference. Specific technical suggestions are made regarding analytic work with overwhelm.

This article provides a historical overview of sexual abuse theory (all in the mind?) within the development of psychoanalytic theory. It aims, from an attachment perspective, to increase awareness of the problem in psychotherapy and other institutions with a view to maximizing prevention and support for the survivors. The article challenges societal and institutional attitudes of secrecy, collusive silence, denial and lies, which perpetuate this relational crime.

This article begins with reference to a recent publication that has challenged some of the previously asserted origins and attributions of group analysis and psychoanalysis. Trigant Burrow was one of the earliest psychoanalysts and coined the term ‘group analysis’ in a certain context early in the 20th-century. The book edited by the Petegatos in Italy is then used as the basis of a study examining the nature of epistemology and its being intimately and necessarily associated with power: a politics of truth. What follows then is an exploration of the work of philosophers, in particular Foucault, and others, venturing across the realms of sociology, history, politics and psychoanalysis and the nature of discourse. It is demonstrated that the claims for truth in any sphere of human life need to be subject to healthy doubt and that the perversion of truth in groups is an ever present risk which we must all take responsibility to challenge.

Discussions of sexual reputation typically involve hints and innuendos, as sexual behavior often cannot be explicitly addressed in public domains. In this article we explore the role of signaling in the creation of reputation, particularly when reputational claims may not be directly articulated. We describe sexual signals in their reach (who learns of the claim) and through their realm (the transparency of meanings). We focus on the publicity of and response to a dramatic sexuality scandal from the Second World War that alleged that a US senator frequented a gay brothel operated by Nazi spies. This scandal – like others involving hidden sexuality – depended on signaling through the discursive forms of euphemism and dysphemism, requiring bounded subcultural knowledge. Signaling relies on local knowledge, often sheltering the powerful by excluding broader publics. Although we focus on the Walsh case, similar dynamics operate in other scandals involving politicians, government officials, and public figures.

This essay explores the historiographic and ethnographic valence of video in Indonesia since 1998, against the backdrop of transition from an authoritarian to a neoliberal regime, and the concurrent renewal of the country’s public sphere. The first section takes Joshua Oppenheimer’s controversial film The Act of Killing (2012) as exemplary of the moving image’s purchase on national trauma, emphasizing its role in the production (and perversion) of official history. The second section concerns the state of video discourse in Indonesia as reflected in a conference held in Yogyakarta in 2011, addressing the diversity of contemporary video practices and situating them in local art and media histories. In a third and final section, we return to the epistemological quandaries raised by Oppenheimer’s film, mooting video’s capacity as a means of reconciliation with the past – a reconciliation that would seem to require both the documentary and a ‘revelatory’ function of the image.

This article explores some ethical and professional implications of social policies that aim to achieve social inclusion through Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) for the un(der)employed (the work-less) and the ‘socially excluded’ (the worth-less) in the UK. A major ethical concern at the heart of this critique is that such policies establish a boundary between domains of inclusion and domains of exclusion that perversely maintain the very problem they are designed to solve. The article explores how we, as a society, are invited to live in a split world and to hold contradictory conceptualizations about un(der)employment, (workless-ness) and social exclusion (worthless-ness). On the one hand we seem to know that these problems are a consequence of the vagaries and vicissitudes of national and international economic policies, yet on the other hand are invited to believe that these problems are a result of individuals’ psychological failures. In these ways dissembling conversations about an ‘imagined’ psychological depression replaces conversations about the very real socio-political and economic ‘depression’ that underlies it—and ‘psychotherapy’ is in danger of becoming the medium through which this dissembling is operationalized.

This article examines the historical truth of the ‘pear of anguish’ – a common exhibit in European dungeon museums that has recently made its way into the popular imagination by way of TV shows and internet sites. Like the ‘chastity belt’ before it, the ‘pear of anguish’ evidences the ‘dark medievalism’ of the modern consciousness, a dystopian view of the Middle Ages that imagines pre-Reformation Europe as a nexus of cruelty and sexual perversion. The historical reality, however, traced here through commentaries and catalogues from the past few centuries, would seem to indicate that both the device itself and its imagined function are creations of the modern world.

In ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, Berlin wavered between two readings of the concept of positive liberty. In the first one, ‘positive liberty’ is a distinct concept, different from that of ‘negative liberty’. Those who advocate liberty in the negative sense and those who advocate it in the positive sense do not disagree on which interpretation of the same thing – ‘liberty’ – is the correct one; they speak about different things. Both defend valid ideals, although those ideals may not be simultaneously achievable. In the second reading, negative and positive liberty are competing interpretations of the same concept, the defenders of negative liberty being involved in a substantive disagreement with the advocates of positive liberty on what the same term – ‘liberty’ – really means. On this understanding, negative and positive liberty cannot both be valid ideals: one of them (negative liberty) is a genuine value, the other (positive liberty) being nothing but the perversion of it. My article aims to uncover the roots of this ambiguity in unresolved difficulties in Berlin’s account of the history of the ideas of negative and positive liberty and, more importantly, in his conception of value pluralism.

Behavioural economics and social psychology have shown that humans have all sorts of psychological quirks. Policy makers have become enthusiastic about taking advantage of these quirks through what Thaler and Sunstein call ‘nudges’. This article asks: when would nudging be manipulative? The article has six parts: (1) publicity and transparency, which claims that Thaler and Sunstein's own attempt to deal with evil nudges is inadequate; (2) manipulation and autonomy, where the nature and wrongness of manipulation is connected to a conception of autonomy; (3) the perversion of the decision-making process – a piecemeal approach, which sorts nudges into easy and hard cases and assesses attempts to pick out certain methods, such as temptation, as manipulative; (4) the perversion of the decision-making process – general accounts, which shows why we do not have a clear, complete and correct account of what such perversion is; (5) intentions and nudging's escape clause, where it is shown that governments that nudge as Thaler and Sunstein would wish do not manipulate because they do not have the intention to manipulate; and (6) consensual manipulation, where it is claimed that manipulation can, with the right consent, be consistent with autonomy.

This article explores new ways in which the French female Decadent writer Rachilde (Marguerite Eymery Vallette, 1860–1953) may be profitably viewed as a ‘proto-queer’ writer. While previous published works argue for Rachilde as ‘proto-queer’ primarily by analysing her games with gendered language and gender inversion, this article contends that Rachilde's deployment of discourses of sexual perversion against the ideological grain places her writing into a queer genealogy. The argument is developed via a close reading of Rachilde's novel of 1887, La Marquise de Sade. Her use of female death-driven perversion as a strategy of anti-social critique in this novel can be productively read alongside recent queer criticisms of reproductive futurism such as those by Lee Edelman.

The case for using academic journals lists is critically scrutinised. An effect of their use, it argued, is to stifle diversity and constrict scholarly innovation. A monoculture is fostered in which a preoccupation with shoehorning research into a form prized by elite, US-oriented journals overrides a concern to maintain and enrich the diversity of topics, the range of methods and the plurality of perspectives engaged in business and management research. Use of a particular journal list, such as the one prepared by the Association of Business Schools (ABS), can come to dominate the scholarly terrain of a particular discipline with consequences that can be damaging to funding as well as to research culture.

The postwar US federal government spent a decade, initiated two federal treason trials, and dispensed over one million dollars in legal pursuit of John Provoo for his crimes in the Philippines as a POW and as a propaganda agent for the Japanese. In a strange perversion of justice the US attorney even invited to the federal court Provoo’s former captors — Japanese propagandists, military officials and POW guards — to establish his guilt. Why was the US government so keen to pursue and charge a lone second world war POW with treason? What dread did Provoo strike in the hearts of US officials? This article examines how Provoo embodied wartime and postwar American panic concerning East Asia, just as the situation in the region dramatically spiraled out of American control.

When UN Secretary General Kofi Annan delivered his annual address to the General Assembly in 1999, he bluntly reminded the gathered heads of state of the UN's failure to act to stop ethnic cleansing earlier that year in Kosovo?a failure that had in turn provoked NATO to initiate an air war over Serbia without Security Council approval. That episode, Annan asserted, "has revealed the core challenge to the Security Council and the United Nations as a whole in the next century: to forge unity behind the principle that massive and systematic viola tions of human rights?wherever they may take place?should not be allowed to stand." Annan declared that the UN must embrace the "developing international norm in favour of intervention to protect civilians from wholesale slaughter." The norm Annan cited had, of course, begun to take root in the aftermath of the genocide in Rwanda, which the world had witnessed with little more than a cry of anguished guilt, and the ethnic cleansing and mass death in Bosnia, to which the UN Security Council had replied with a humanitarian mission protected by ill-equipped and outnumbered peacekeepers. Annan had been sounding this theme for the previous eighteen months, prompting hope across the West that the UN, and the Security Council, might eventually discover its moral purpose.

In an apartment building on Chicago's Southside, fifty of the seventy-five residents are sex workers. Our study uses in-depth interviews and participant observation of Chicago's sex work economy to argue that sex work is one constituent part of an overall low-wage, off-the-books economy of resource exchange among individuals in a bounded geographic setting. To an outsider, the decision to be a sex worker seems irrational; in this article we argue that specific localized conditions invert this decision and render it entirely rational. For the men and women in our study, sex work acts as a short-term solution that “satisfices” the demands of persistent poverty and instability, and it provides a meaningful option in the quest for a job that provides autonomy and personal fulfillment.

This article re-evaluates the emphasis on the ‘homo/hetero binary’, which appears in many discussions of sexuality since the late 19th century, by exploring several key European sexological texts and their classifications of sexual desire between men. It suggests that these writers offered not so much a nascent binary between ‘homosexual’ and ‘heterosexual’ individuals, but a complex and contradictory set of sexual ontologies that encoded liminality as well as notions of innate sexual perversion. A strand of sexual fluidity lived on through the 20th century, forming a counternarrative to the notion that individuals could be assigned to either a heterosexual or a homosexual subject position. Such a rereading of important sexological writings offers us one way to complicate current assumptions about the birth and subsequent influence of ‘the homosexual’ and the prevalence of the ‘homo/hetero binary’. This impels us to more closely investigate the spaces lying between and around the poles of this binary.

Several detailed analytic hours illustrate how, with the analyst's full participation, patients use the words, setting, and activity of analysis to gratify the very wishes they are analyzing, and so disavow the work of analysis. These gratifications, which are hidden in plain sight, are themselves disavowed in the apparent pursuit of analytic understanding. In this way the patient's and the analyst's use of the analytic situation becomes the fundamental resistance to the work itself. This process shares features in common with perversion. The painful but necessary task for both analyst and patient is to analyze this process as it is occurring, moment by moment, in the real time of the hour.

Anime abounds in images of ‘nonhuman women’, that is, goddesses, female robots, gynoids, alien women, animal girls, female cyborgs, and many others. This article provides an introduction to problems of gender and genre in relation to the nonhuman woman, followed by an extended discussion of the animated television series Chobits, based on a manga series by the four-woman team CLAMP. In a manner eerily consonant with psychoanalytic theory, Chobits reads problems of media and technology almost exclusively in terms of human desire, in terms of the weird substance of enjoyment. Yet, because the nonhuman woman remains nonhuman, structures of desire are subject to perverse material twists, and Chobits offers a very unusual logic of suture. The nonhuman woman becomes the catalyst for ways of looking that appear to bypass relations with Others altogether, promising the production of entirely new worlds at some elemental level of perception.

Extracted from text ... 848 BOOK REVIEW Title: The perversion of loss: Psychoanalytic perspectives on trauma Editors: Susan Levy and Alessandra Lemma Date: 2004 Publisher: Whurr Publishers ISBN: 0415950856 (hardback, 176 pages) A new psychoanalytic text on psychological trauma is a welcome event, even more so when one of the editors is South African. Susan Levy, a Johannesburg psychotherapist, and Alessandra Lemma, a London-based consultant psychologist, have co-edited this collection of nine chapters addressing contemporary psychoanalysis'contribution to understanding and treating trauma. The title of the book indicates the fundamental premise that all psychic trauma involves loss of some sort - whether actual or ..

A period of transition in the life of a forensic outpatient group is described. Transference and countertransference issues were stirred up by the change of conductor, and related to the theme of perversion in the group. In order to preserve confidentiality, the identity of group members is disguised. Their contributions to the group have been combined and changed in order not to represent individuals but to convey the essence of the group process.

Exhibitionism is defined by the DSM-IV (American Psychiatric Association, 1994) as a paraphilia involving exposing one’s genitals to a stranger. Within psycho-medical discourse, exhibitionism is defined as abnormal and devoid of sexual motivation, and ‘normal’ female sexuality is often construed as passive. This study sought to explore the ways in which women exhibitionists themselves construct their activities. Six women were interviewed online about their motivations to exhibit and the perceived effects of exhibitionism. Using discourse analysis, we found that the women promoted and normalized their exhibitionism utilizing repertoires such as ‘personal fulfilment’, ‘self as responsible’, and ‘exhibitionism as socially supported’. Notably, the women tended to deploy traditional psycho-medical discourse around male exhibitionists to augment their own, more positive, self-constructions. The alternative constructions of women’s exhibitionism are discussed as well as the unitary conceptualization of paraphilia.

This article is a close literary reading of the Parable of the Vineyard in Isaiah 5:1-7, paying particular attention to shifts of gender and voice, since the poem begins with the prophet adopting the guise of the female singer. It continues with the poem's evocation and systematic subversion of literary genres, in particular the love song and the prophetic rib, or lawsuit. With the divine judgement in vs. 5-6, intertextual resonances serve to ambiguate the text. Finally, in v. 7, with its apparent decoding, the parable effects a displacement into metaphor and metonymy, since none of the terms is entirely clear. Most important, the suppressed female voice in the poem reemerges in a cry of protest, against the perversion of justice, indeed, but also against the parable itself.

Lolita: A name that conjures up images of preadolescent allure and perversion. The Lolita look has become a main stay not only of movies, books, and magazines but also of advertising, particularly fashion advertising. In this brief study, Galician’s model for media literacy is applied to four illustrative fashion advertisements. The sexualization of preadolescent and adolescent girls has implications for their psychological and physical well-being.

At the end of the 19th century, the vocabulary of sexuality - perversion - became one of the primary means by which people began to articulate and think about their individuality, their sense of self. Joining authors like Ian Hacking and Arnold Davidson, I suggest the importance of a ‘style of reasoning’ to the creation of sexual kinds at the end of the 19th century, a kind of reasoning that might be styled as historical. For the invert to become possible as a human kind, the conceptual space for an understanding of inverts as specific kinds needed to be cleared. In France, this was accomplished by conceiving individuals as elaborated historically, as the product of prior generations, and by differentiating them from other kinds of people via notions of heredity and degeneration. The invert was plotted within the meta-récit of French progress (and national degeneration). This logic of ‘historicization’ also entailed the scrutiny of the patient’s past in order to reveal his or her ‘nature’ as pathological. Understanding the conceptualization of inversion as including, in part, a ‘pursuit of memory’ provides a window onto the vexing question of how people come to take up their classifications; that is, how discourses interact with the subjects they purport to describe. Through the ‘pursuit of memory’, persons were encouraged to (re)describe their pasts in terms of the present diagnosis. An essential attribute of the literature on ‘inversion’ was precisely such an historically formed understanding of pathological individuals; an understanding that ushered in the transformation from acts to natures, from individuals to kinds, from sodomites to homosexuals.

This paper describes the difficulty of working with patients who have adopted conflict solutions common to perversion. These analysands' rapid shifts from one discontinuous mental state to another draw the analyst into a regressive transference/countertransference engagement characterized by alternations of actualized self and object representations. The analyst's disengagement from this regressive interaction is crucial, but difficult. A detailed clinical example illustrates the process of disengagement as well as the transformation of this transference into a more traditionally consolidated one. A technical approach is suggested and questions of representation and symbolization are explored.

Many of the patients referred to NHS groups are involved in abusive relationships. This article seeks to examine the nature of such relationships through the literature of psychoanalysis and psycho-therapy and to put forward the proposal that heterogeneous groups provide a good opportunity to look at making changes in such relationships.

This paper explores the transference dynamics and underlying fantasies of analysands whose characters have been shaped by conflict solutions common to perversion. Giving the impression of a serious engagement for therapeutic ends, these individuals live out in the treatment a sexualized enactment in which the analyst's interventions are transformed into a fetish. This enactment is designed to support a defensive effort to avoid external perceptions that trigger certain fantasies of danger, including that of castration. It is designed also to cancel out interventions of the analyst that become equated with these frightening fantasies. Since the analyst's efforts to explore and interpret this enactment are also turned into a fetish, such a transference poses grave difficulties for the analysis. A technical approach is suggested in which the analyst focuses on the contradiction itself, the operation of the disavowal, the fantasy of danger that motivates the persistent use of disavowal, and the underlying, often vengeful and envious wishes that contribute both to the undermining of the analysis and to the content of the fantasies of danger that provoke so much anxiety.

The role of perverse sexuality as an organizing influence in “multiple personality” is explored in this paper. Following a brief review of psychoanalytic thinking on sexual trauma and perversion, the author discusses his own views on dissociation and “multiple personality.” A clinical case is then presented in which transsexualism, homosexuality, and sadomasochistic heterosexual practices were manifested during altered ego states. Analysis of the transference revealed the centrality of sadomasochism in this patient. It is hypothesized that various perverse structures may be formed within these seemingly autonomous, amnestic states, in order to contain anxiety and encapsulate the aggression which resulted from early psychic trauma. Issues relating to diagnosis, counter-transference, reconstruction, and psychoanalytic technique are discussed also.If each, I told myself, could but be housed in separate identities, life would be relieved of all that was unbearable …Robert Louis StevensonThe Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

An attempt is made to place bestophilia in cultural, clinical, and theoretical perspective. Archeological and anthropological documentation and records of the widespread appearance in mythology of this practice are cited. This archaic form of perversion is still practiced in rural environments and isolated communities. The treatment of a man who grew up in such an environment gave the author the opportunity to study this form of perversion. The correlation of clinical findings with culturally sanctioned bestophilia provides a bridge between the understanding of psychopatnology and anthropological variation.

In comparing sexual murderers with a history of sex abuse (n = 12) with murderers without such a history (n = 16), findings that approach a level of significance between early sexual abuse and sexual deviations include zoophilia (.06) and sexual sadism (.07) with the ultimate expression of the murderer's perversion being the mutilation of the victim. Murderers with sexual abuse histories report fantasizing about rape earlier than murderers without sexual abuse histories (.05) and report aversion to peer sex in adolescence and adulthood (.05). Significant differences in behavioral indicators comparing across developmental levels of childhood include cruelty to animals (.05), and differences approaching significance include isolation (.09), convulsions (.09), cruelty to children (.09) and assaultive to adults (.09). Significant differences in adolescence between murderers with child sexual abuse history versus nonhistory include running away (.01), sleep problems (.05), daydreams (.05), rebellious (.05), assaultive to adults (.05), and indicators approaching significance include temper tantrums (.09) and self-mutilation (.09).

A study of 200 women street prostitutes documents extremely high levels of on-the-job victimization. Subjects reported being physically abused and beaten by both customers and pimps. Other forms of victimization included customer rape, forced perversion, non-payment, robbery, violence, clients going beyond the prostitution contract, and unfair split of money with pimps.

In the course of a variety of projects concerned with fundamentalism and evangelical Protestantism, a surprising number of claims about sexual misdemeanour have been collected. The fact that most of the individuals and movements accused of perversion were claimed to be, and were widely regarded as, puritanical in moral attitudes and behaviour suggests that the widespread distribution of such accusations calls for some explanation other than that they were made because they were true. This paper offers some preliminary thoughts on the appeal of claims of sexual deviance to those making the claims and to the audiences for such claims. As such it represents some introductory thoughts on what might be termed ‘the sociology of accusation’.