CWL581, Blake. "Que vuoi ? symptom and desire." T 1-2:50

Neurosis: phobia, hysteria, obsession, these are the bread and butter of Freudian psychoanalysis. From the plethora of clinical insights to be mined in the case studies of the inventor of the psychotherapy, many if not all students of Freud come to recognize those strategies that underlie all psychic life. Dora, the Rat Man and Little Hans no longer need to be judged in pathological terms for the lesson is that almost inevitably the human subject will “choose” a neurosis (SE I, p. 220) The psychic symptom is a means of negotiating the imperatives of desire faced with the nameless fear of losing the ability to want. Hence these “compromise formations” come to be viewed as no less respectable than any other creative productions.

Perversion, on the other hand, if it is a structure of desire, seldom evokes sympathy or kinship. Lacan enjoys the paradox involved in praising its economy as the ultimate model of ethical life, as he insists in his famous essay “Kant avec Sade”. Moreover, in Lacan’s view, the logic of perversion is that of human desire itself. Lacan reminds us that Freud teaches how human desire is perverse in that it defies the laws of adaptation and survival which are necessarily operative in the animal world.

Like neurosis, perversion is a strategy to negotiate desire. Unlike the neurotic subject, however, the pervert can only obtain satisfaction by becoming the object of the other’s fantasy, in order to expose the fundamental anxiety that all fantasy comes to camouflage. This ‘abjectification’ explains the negative reactions, from disgust to horror, which perversion commonly elicits. In uncovering the workings of desire, the fantasy of the other, the pervert de-idealizes the social bond: family, clan, nation. The goal of the pervert is not, difficult as this idea may be to grasp, to obtain personal gratification. The pervert is under the power of an epistomophilic drive, s/he wants to discover a law, beneath the mask of social order and values. While the neurotic succeeds in nurturing his desire by devising strategies to prevent its realization, the pervert succeeds in fulfilling the desire of the neurotic at he cost of sacrificing himself. The precision and the correctness of the pervert’s analysis of social bonds leaves him little space for the illusion necessary to maintain his own desire. Lacan’s contribution to the understanding of perversion has allowed us to apprehend this structure, not as faulty sexual drive, Freud has already taught us that all human sexuality is aberrant, or as Tim Dean puts it,”All sexuality is queer sexuality”. Rather Lacan has helped us trace this type of psychic functioning to one more method of interpreting the vicissitudes of desire.

Michel de M’Uzan notes that practicing psychoanalysts have only rare opportunities to encounter perversion in the clinical setting, firstly because perverts are even more deeply committed than neurotics to their structure and are so satisfied with their perversion that they do not request a cure. M’Uzan, and others, owe their chance to study perversion to the intervention of the medical legal authorities who, having apprehended a subject displaying the scars testifying to masochistic practices for example, have recourse to the analyst for an expert evaluation of the pathology. Under the present legislation in the European Union, we could expect in the near future an increase of case studies of pedophilia for this very reason.

With neurosis and psychosis, perversion constitutes one of the major categories of human libidinal organization. While much is to be obtained from further exploration of clinical data concerning perversion, another fertile area of investigation is opened by the prevalence of insights concerning perversion unveiled by numerous contemporary creative productions. This seminar will examine writing and film portraying, overtly or covertly, the logic of perversion.