The International Journal of

Int J Psychoanal (2010) 91:141–162 doi: 10.1111/j.1745-8315.2009.00220.x

Murder on the mind: Tyranical power and other

points along the perverse spectrum

Richard Tuch
New Center for Psychoanalysis, Los Angeles, 1800 Fairburn Ave., Ste. 206, Los
Angeles, CA 90025, USA – rtuch@aol.com

(Final version accepted 4 August 2009)

This paper illustrates the breadth and depth of the spectrum of perversion and per-
versity as currently represented in the psychoanalytic literature, raises questions
about recent tendencies to include a host of diverse-seeming phenomena under the
same conceptual umbrella, and strives to demonstrate what these phenomena have
in common that justifies lumping them together under the same rubric. One end of
this spectrum is represented by the employment of simple fetishes introduced into
a sexual scene in order to promote sexual arousal. Moving along the continuum,
one encounters increasing complex behavioral patterns including the enactment of
scripts that actualize one’s perverse fantasies, including the assumption of comple-
mentary roles (e.g. sadomasochism) that equally serve the needs, and represent
the desires, of both parties involved. A unique clinical entity, ‘perverse modes of
relatedness,’ lies on the extreme end of the spectrum, representing the reification
of the relationship as it becomes little more than a vehicle to take possession and
control one’s object for the gratification of one’s sole needs and desires. What
each of these phenomena share in common is both the insertion of a thing or con-
dition – ranging from a simple fetishistic object to an elaborate style of relating
that reduces the other into pawn played upon the pervert’s chessboard, between
the two ‘relating’ objects as well as a less than honest relationship with reality.

Keywords: disavowal, fetish, fetishization, perversions, perversity, sadomasochism

Recent psychoanalytic writers have applied the term ‘perversion’ to an ever-

expanding array of phenomena, thus extending the use of the term beyond
the more precise definition adopted by earlier writers. While perversion is
still widely considered to be essentially sexual in nature, some forms of per-
version are now seen as a manifestation of sexualization – a process that
lends non-sexual phenomena a decidedly sexual flavor. Some argue that sex-
ualized hostility, not misguided libido, lies at the heart of perversion (Stoller,
1975). The existence of a group of perverse phenomena, including perverse
character structure (Arlow, 1971) and perverse modes of relatedness (Filip-
pini, 2005; Tuch, 2008), which lacks anything resembling sexuality aside
from an intensity and quality of excitement analogous to that which charac-
terizes sexual arousal, contributes to our wondering how and whether these
diverse phenomena have enough in common with more typical forms of per-
version to call them by the same name. Given the expanding universe of
perversion and perversity, the time seems ripe to both provide an overview
and attempt a synthesis of how the varied phenomena referred to as
perverted or perverse fit together. Particular emphasis will be placed on

ª 2010 Institute of Psychoanalysis

Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK and
350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA on behalf of the Institute of Psychoanalysis
142 R. Tuch

exploring the extreme end of the perverse spectrum that includes perverse
modes of relatedness.
Traditionally, perversion referred to the use of less than traditional objects
(e.g. animals) or means (e.g. spanking) to obtain sexual satisfaction, but tra-
ditions have a way of changing and today the use of the term ‘perversion’ is
no longer restricted, as it once had been, to ‘‘every expression of [sexual
instinct] that does not correspond with the purpose of nature – i.e. propaga-
tion’’ (Krafft-Ebing, 1932, cited in Davidson, 1987, p. 39). While Laplanche
and Pontalis (1973) state definitively that ‘‘in psycho-analysis, the word ‘per-
version’ is used exclusively in relation to sexuality’’ (p. 307, italics added), a
review of the recent literature reveals this to be no longer the case (Filippini,
2005; Grossman, 1993; Jimenez, 2004; Ogden, 1996; Stein, 2005; Tuch,
2008; Zimmer, 2003). Perversion was once thought to involve a fixation at
an infantile level of psychosexual development, resulting in the preferential
use of one of the pregenital component instincts. Today, the term is also
used to refer to the sexualization of what are essentially non-sexual – of
hatred, a wish to dominate others, to exact revenge, or to avoid intimacy –
instances when such behaviors and ⁄ or fantasies are neither a manifestation
of a somatic drive nor an attempt to satisfy a bodily need (Coen, 1981;
Glasser, 1986; Goldberg, 1995; Parsons, 2000). Rather than being about sex-
ual arousal and sensual pleasure, such sexualized behaviors and ⁄ or fantasies
primarily serve defensive functions in situations where ‘‘defense has greater
urgency and significance in the patient’s motivational hierarchy than does
sexual drive gratification’’ (Coen, 1981 p. 907). In this regard, Khan (1979)
observes:
I have yet to meet a pervert who was compelled from the authentic instinctual pres-
sure of his body-impulses to reach out to an object for gratification. It is all engi-
neered from the head and then instinctual apparatuses and functions are zealously
exploited in the service of program sexuality.
(p. 15)

While perversion often involves the experience of excitement much like

that of sexual arousal, it is not necessarily the case that this excitement is,
by nature, truly sexual. Reasoning that look-alikes are alike, as Freud (1905)
was often apt to do, it is easy to conclude that one is witnessing sexual
excitement in action given the intensity and quality of the affect. But such
reasoning runs counter to the principle omnis analogia claudet – that every
analogy limps. So when Freud comments that: ‘‘No one who has seen a
baby sinking back satiated from the breast and falling asleep with flushed
cheeks and a blissful smile can escape the reflection that this picture persists
as a prototype of the expression of sexual satisfaction in later life’’ (Freud,
1905, p. 182), we sense he is both on to something from a primary process
perspective, yet, at the same time, relying dangerously on analogies to draw
potentially fallacious connections, verging on the employment of a symbolic
equation. A frenzied rat pressing a lever over and over and over again
triggering an electrode implanted in the pleasure center of his brain, a
heroin addict excitedly injecting himself into unparalleled heights of
ecstasy need not necessarily be sexual experiences, though they may come

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remarkably close to looking like ones. So, when it comes to perversion and
perversity, what looks like sexuality often proves to be a sexualization of the
non-sexual.
Expanding the term ‘perversion’ to include phenomena that are essentially
non-sexual in nature might seem, to some, a perversion in and of itself –
a twisting and corruption of the term to the point where it ceases to
meaningfully describe a discrete process or phenomenon. This paper strives
to discover what the varied phenomena currently subsumed under the rubric
‘perversion’ or ‘perversity’ have in common that justifies lumping them
together conceptually.
Aside from the current practice of using the term ‘perversion’ to refer to
the sexualization of that which is not innately sexual, another trend extends
the term to include a particular style of relatedness distinctly non-reciprocal
in nature in which one party’s needs are unilaterally foist upon another. The
second party is psychically caught off-guard and held hostage through
the use of particular sorts of transactional maneuvers – often through the
use of projective identification. The power tactics of perversion involve
‘‘disadvantaging the other by robbing him ⁄ her of the presence of mind
needed to be able to participate as an equal partner in the co-construction
of the unfolding events’’ (Tuch, 2008, p. 147). Such instances of ‘perverse
relatedness’ also extend the term ‘fetish’ beyond its common usage: a thing,
condition, circumstance, fantasy, script, conjured up image, etc., which is
inserted into a given sexual scene in order to create or heighten sexual
arousal. As one moves along the perverse spectrum, fetishization begins to
affect the entirety of selected object relations resulting in the adoption of a
particular style of relating that fetishizes the nature of the relationship itself.
It is this particular form of perversion – perverse relatedness – that serves
as the main focus of this paper.

Sadomasochism versus perverse relatedness

When one speaks of active and passive component instincts that form ‘pairs
of opposites’ (e.g. sadism ⁄ masochism, exhibitionism ⁄ voyeurism), one is
referring to the bilateral assumption of complementary roles the enactment
of which satisfies the respective needs of each of the parties involved. For
example, while the masochist’s need to be mistreated is served by the
maintenance of an illusion that he is powerless to resist the mistreatment his
torturer ‘imposes,’ Stoller (1975) is quick to note the existence of an explicit,
unspoken but intuitively understood, ‘masochistic contract’ unconsciously
drawn up between the masochist and the sadist, stipulating what is and is
not permitted, what can and cannot be done. This contract grants the
masochist the power to bring the action to a halt if it extends beyond the
well-defined limits of his or her fantasy. The action is to take place within
these confines; hence, the sadism is not truly sadistic, rather it is invited,
limited and controlled sadism – illusory sadism.
Unlike the sort of reciprocal arrangement just described, perverse related-
ness involves the imposition of one party’s needs on to the other – forced
interactions that in no way satisfy the desires of the other party (Tuch,

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2008). In this regard, true sadism, as might be found in such instances of

perverse relatedness, is exemplified by a masochist’s pleading for mistreat-
ment and a sadist who, refusing the role assignment, takes pleasure and
rejoices in frustrating the masochistic’s wish. Now that, some would argue,
is perverted! While perverse relatedness of the sort outlined in this comical
illustration never quite works in this precise manner, this joke of sorts still
illustrates the point – that there is a world of difference between the collabo-
ration of sadomasochism and the tyranny of perverse relatedness.
While some feel it is unwarranted to classify these types of one-sided
interactions as perversions, there is a clear trend in the literature to do just
that. McDougall (1995) wonders whether ‘‘the only aspect of fantasy that
might legitimately be described as perverse would be the attempt to force
one’s erotic imagination on a non-consenting or a non-responsible other ….
Perhaps in the last resort, only relationships can aptly be termed perverse’’
(pp. 177–8, italics added). The perverse individual’s sexual ‘partner’ (if he or
she can truly be called that) is not permitted free reign to act as he or she
pleases in accordance with his or her own wishes and ⁄ or responses to the
perverse individual’s behavior since doing so threatens to derail the enact-
ment of the perverse individual’s highly specific fantasy. In such instances of
perversity, De Masi (1999) notes:
Objects live only to the extent that they perform the tasks assigned to them by the
imagination. If the partner were experienced as alive and independent, the freedom
and omnipotence of fantasy could not exist; a real partner with his or her own
requirements or needs sets a limit to the imagination and, as such, diminishes the
level of excitation.
(p. 79)

The closer the enactment of a perverse scene comes to replicating identi-

cally the perverse individual’s fantasy, the more the object is reduced to the
function of a mere puppet that is, not who is, played upon the pervert’s
stage, the more reassured the perverse individual becomes that others pose
no threat to the full and complete realization of his or her fantasy – leading
to levels of excitement analogous with what one experiences in the course of
an actual sexual encounter. As one slides along the perverse continuum, the
needs and desires of the other increasingly fail to be taken into consider-
ation, in distinction to how things operate on the less extreme end of the per-
verse spectrum where the entire interaction is understood to be a negotiated
(reciprocal) affair.
Perverse modes of relatedness are illustrated in Arlow’s (1971) description
of perverse character structure (in particular, the perpetration of a practical
joke played at the other’s expense). Arlow describes how the perverse indi-
vidual takes advantage of the gullibility of another who, in falling for the
pervert’s hoax, is made to play the fool by experiencing the emotions (often
anxiety and panic, and – once the hoax is exposed – humiliation) elicited
by the faux ‘reality’ created by the jokester’s fabrication. For example, a boy
wraps black paper around his two front teeth, effectively simulating the loss
of these teeth. He then goes about his business until his mother notices and
panics at the sight. The boy in question, now an adult undergoing analysis,

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discovers that his actions had meant to cause his mother the same sort of
shock he once experienced as a boy when he had been exposed to her
genitals – her comparably missing member – as the result of her habit of
‘carelessly’ appearing naked in her son’s presence (Arlow, 1971).

The perverse spectrum

Since the fetish is the prototype for all perversions (Bak, 1968; Stoller,
1975), we will focus our study on the various ways in which fetishistic
mechanisms can be seen operating across the spectrum of perversity. This
perverse spectrum ranges from the utilization of simple fetishes to more
complex forms of scripted fetishistic behavior to instances of perverse relat-
edness. What distinguishes the simple fetish (e.g. an anxiety-relieving object
inserted into the sexual scene, or a perverse fantasy that directs the action
of a scripted sexual scenario), on one end of the perverse spectrum, from
the complex fetishization process encountered in perverse relatedness, on the
other, is the nature of what is being defended against, the degree to which
one’s sense of reality becomes compromised by the tendency to disavow
aspects of reality, and the degree to which the entirety of one’s object
relations becomes infused with hostility – with the wish to harm the object
and gain and control over the object, turning the object into something to
be played, dehumanizing it in the process. The more pathological narcissism
contributes to the creation of a perversion (Kernberg, 1992), the more per-
version serves to defend against psychotic anxieties (Glover, 1933; Malcolm,
1970; Stein, 2005), shore up a sense of personal disintegration (Goldberg,
1995) or relieve a sense of deadness (Khan, 1979), the greater is the chance
that it will involve sexualization (Coen, 1981) and the stronger will be the
need to disavow threatening aspects of reality, leading to greater degrees of
impairment in one’s grasp of reality (Arlow, 1971; Chasseguet-Smirgel,
1981, 1984, 1991; Grossman, 1992, 1993, 1996; Jimenez, 2004; Zimmer
2003).
Fetishistic behavior can serve to lessen a host of different anxieties: fear
of castration stimulated by the sight of a woman’s vagina, annihilation anxi-
ety caused by fears of becoming engulfed by the object, fear of once again
being humiliated by being ‘played’ by another or teased into wanting, then
turned away when judged unworthy, fear of experiencing overwhelming help-
lessness in the face of abandonment, etc. If a man is anxious about a
woman’s lack of a penis, the fetish is used to concretely represent, substitute
for, and hence deny absence of the penis. If anxiety centers around fantasies
of engulfment, fetishization serves to lessen the object’s power and impor-
tance by reducing it to an insignificant and dismissible other. If a repeat of
childhood humiliation is that fate to be avoided, one can fetishize the
relationship such that the other becomes the one cast in the role of the
humiliated fool. States of dependency that leave the individual at the mercy
of the prospectively need-satisfying other are also solved by fetishization.
Experiencing and acknowledging a bodily need that requires the authentic
participation of an acknowledged ‘other’ is the last thing a fetishist wants,
and many believe it is the manic avoidance of this very situation that is the

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life-blood of the perverse drive (De Masi, 1999). If the man fears becoming
overwhelmingly vulnerable by recognizing his dependence on a woman to
satisfy his needs, he can introduce a scripted scenario the enactment of
which serves to reassure him there is nothing to fear, believing the object is
now under his utter and complete control.
Perverse relatedness involves relating to others in ways that fail to con-
form to generally accepted norms of how individuals engaged in a loving
and mutually respectful relationship typically treat one another. This, in and
of itself, is a perversion of what most consider ‘a relationship.’ Perverse
modes of relatedness turn the intimacy of interpersonal relationships into a
charade by emphasizing the power and control dimension of relationships
over reciprocity and mutuality (Khan, 1979). A perverse approach to inter-
personal relations involves the single-minded effort to amass interpersonal
power and wield control over others not as a means to an end, in which case
we would be referring to the trait of manipulativeness, but as an end unto
itself – control for control’s sake, for the sheer pleasure and triumph of
exerting control over another. Interacting with others in a perverse manner
expresses the pervert’s cruel streak and precludes any consideration of the
needs, feelings or rights of the other, apart from the wish to create feelings
ultimately aimed at psychically capturing the object (Tuch, 2008) so that he
will stay in one place as the fetishist metes out his torture.

A clinical example of perverse relatedness

A good example of perverse relatedness is provided by a 19 year-old college
student named Corky who sought treatment because he was plagued by the
impulse to take another’s life in a cold and calculated way – making sure
he could see registered in his victim’s eyes the recognition that he held that
person’s life in the palm of his hand as he slowly strangled him or her to
death. The idea of such an event filled Corky with excitement and dread.
He could not stop thinking about the prospect of such a thrilling experience
– could not imagine forgoing the enactment of such a deeply satisfying
experience – all the while terrified that he might actually lose control and
act on impulse.
Unlike the disturbing, intrusive thoughts characteristically experienced by
obsessive-compulsive patients, which produce no excitement and, instead,
are experienced as vexing and alien, Corky was well aware of just how
excited such fantasies made him feel – fantasies he recognized as his own
that reflected his wish to see his own reflection in the eyes of the other as
the one capable of causing such terror. Sometimes Corky would talk of
wanting not only to be the cause of the terror, but literally to be the terror
living inside the other. In this way, affecting his goal would leave nothing to
chance as he took complete control over his object in ways he feared might
be done to him by others. It was chilling to hear him describe his wish, very
much unlike what one experiences upon hearing the report of an obsessive
patient’s intrusive thoughts.
I felt alarmed and unsettled by Corky’s fantasies and questioned whether
I would feel comfortable enough taking him into treatment. Corky was a

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tall, strapping young lad who seemed physically capable of carrying out such
a deed. Sensing my discomfort, Corky went to great lengths to reassure me
that he would never target an authority figure, so I was in no danger – so
he said. Only later did Corky clarify that he might cease to see me as an
authority were I to get too close, become overly familiar. I also learned of
the excitement, pleasure and glee he experienced in shocking others by casu-
ally mentioning his wish to kill, which he carried out with a studied inno-
cence for effect. He explained that he liked ‘messing with people’s heads,’
expressing the opinion that stimulating another to merely imagine the pros-
pect of his or her being tortured was far more terrorizing than torture itself.
Soon after we had begun working together, Corky lay down on the couch
at the beginning of a session and announced: ‘‘I killed last night!’’ I was, to
say the least, caught off-guard by what he had said – unable to determine,
at first, whether he had finally succumbed to the urge to kill or, rather, to
the urge to yank my chain. Corky had developed an interest in performing
stand-up comedy and would seek out open mikes to try out his latest
material. He knew full well the shock his words would stir in me given the
nature of his presenting complaint, and he enjoyed the devilish act of setting
me up and playing me in this manner. He was purposefully manipulating
my feelings, savoring the experience of power all the while acting as if this
was the furthest thing from his mind. After allowing a few moments for his
words to sink in and create their intended effect, Corky acted as if it just
then occurred to him that I might take his words literally. He apologized for
having ‘inadvertently’ shocked me, clarifying that he was referring to his
having succeeded as a comedian the night before. So here he was introducing
perverse elements into our relationship, momentarily converting the analysis
into a stand-up act with me the butt of the joke.
In fact, Corky’s wish to be a stand-up comic was a sublimation of the
same underlying wishes that drove him to want to murder in the fashion
described. He had been a sensitive child who had been mercilessly teased
and taunted by the kids at school – targeted on account of his shyness, his
strange quirky sense of humor, and his lack of social skills – and terrorized
by his father’s volatile temper – a man who was rarely at home and pro-
vided no empathy or effective guidance for the patient’s struggles with peers
when he was young. To feel the power of making an entire room of strang-
ers burst into uncontrollable laughter was gratifying to the extent it helped
reverse his feeling of having been a vulnerable, powerless child who was the
hapless victim of others.
Corky had been psychiatrically hospitalized on three different occasions
early in adolescence. He had been depressed and had attempted suicide in
what I took to be a cry for help. He was filled with self-hatred and felt pain-
fully alone. Eventually he was sent away to a camp where, at the age of 16,
his suicidal thoughts turned into homicidal impulses, first experienced when
he had the urge to throw a 2 year-old boy he was holding into the water
nearby. Thereafter, his murderous impulses were directed toward others
rather than himself. At the time he was referred to me, he had just been
released from another hospitalization after others at college learned of his
wishes to kill. Corky was seen in twice weekly psychoanalytically oriented

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psychotherapy conducted inconsistently on the couch due to his difficulty in

forgoing visual contact with me.
Those who relate to others in a perverse fashion are often inclined to play
practical jokes on others – making sport of pulling wool over their victims’
eyes (Arlow, 1971). My patient’s humor and sadism were displayed in
another incident that occurred the session after he had noticed I had been
to the barber. He began the following session by telling me: ‘‘I failed to
mention last session that your haircut made you look good … ‘‘because it
didn’t!’’ The way in which Corky delivered the line effectively set me up to
expect a compliment. He then pulled the rug out from under that expecta-
tion, turning it into the opposite, laughing at me for having expected some-
thing good. I had been caught in the act of wanting and wishing, positioned
by Corky who then exposed my naked want. Having effectively outsmarted
me filled him with a sense of triumph that was expressed by an unspoken
but understood declaration: Gotcha! Clearly, he was a consummate comic
as well as a talented tease.1
‘Fooled once, shame on you; fooled twice, shame on me!’ Fooling others
is the pervert’s stock and trade (Arlow, 1971) – making sure he is not the
one left shamefully and frustratingly empty-handed, still hoping and wait-
ing. That experience is to be the other’s, whom the pervert cleverly positions
by stimulating, then dashing, the other’s hope. Coen (1998) describes the
typical tease perpetrated by the pervert who entices the analyst ‘‘with the
possibility of genuine relatedness, only to frustrate such hope in the other
and to enjoy it’’ (p. 183). Stein (2005) describes this exact same counter-
transference experience in reaction to the pervert’s efforts to dodge and out-
wit the analyst’s human need for intimacy:
I was intrigued, frustrated, embarrassed and tantalized by the continual promise
that here, now, soon, just around the corner, things would start to unfold and move
… [The patient] was battling with me, poking fun at me, while bringing everything
down to the same, meaningless, confused plane.
(p. 786)

The practical jokes Corky played on me provided ample opportunity to

interpret his wish to feel powerful in our relationship, to turn me into the
hapless victim who is shamed in the act of being tricked – serving the dual
goals of exacting revenge on the bullies of his childhood and making sure
he would never again be in a position of vulnerability. Outside the consult-
ing-room the patient would also present his fabrications as fact. When he
arrived at a new job he would speak with an Australian accent, explaining
to his co-workers that he had just moved to town from Melbourne – a ruse
he maintained for a time. Not only did this serve the purpose of making
fools of others who fell for his prank, but it also protected him from others
knowing enough about him to be in a position to mistreat him as he had
been as a child.
1
I want to be sure I am not misunderstood as suggesting that comedy is, per se, perverse – only that
comedy can sometimes be used to serve perverse ends. There are instances when an individual’s tendency
to make everything into a joke and to take nothing seriously represents another manifestation of
perverse relatedness.

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The ramifications of the Corky’s fantasy of murder were many and varied.
He was a prolific writer who channeled his murderous fantasies into short
stories about serial killers – ‘assassins with morals,’ as he called them –
whose acts were justified by the fact they exclusively targeted evil individuals
who preyed upon the weak, the innocent and the defenseless. He spoke in
terms of ‘revenge’, ‘redress of imbalances’, ‘righting wrongs’ and ‘bringing
others to justice’, and he explained how powerless authority begets vigilan-
tes. Corky was also a voracious reader who buried his head in books to
avoid the cruelty he felt was inherent in human relations. He had read much
of the Dracula literature and could compare and contrast various versions
of the famed tale. In particular, he was fascinated with the idea of the vam-
pire’s taking charge of others by drinking their blood, thus creating a spiri-
tual bond between them – a sort of forced soul-mate state that permitted
the vampire to take complete charge of his victim.
Over the course of our work together, Corky and I were able to make
headway in understanding the experiences that triggered his wish to kill.
Although he had once experienced his fantasies of murder as random occur-
rences, we began to discover the context within which such fantasies would
arise. Of late, these impulses typically occurred whenever he had felt frus-
trated or jealous in his relations with girls he was interested in. Connecting
these experiences with his murderous fantasies helped Corky not only relive
and process some of the earlier experiences of being teased and taunted by
his peers, it also facilitated in the exploration of his childhood experiences
with his parents in which he felt similarly powerless and vulnerable. Thank-
fully, the frequency and intensity of Corky’s murderous impulses greatly
abated as therapy progressed. He is now much less frightened of losing con-
trol and much more genuinely and comfortably attached to me, which he
can readily admit.

Reification in the sexual arena

The fetishist’s view of the object, as well as his or her relation with that
object, becomes increasingly thing-like as one moves along the perverse con-
tinuum, resulting in a muffling of the fetishist’s direct experience of the real-
ity of the other. A man in the midst of a sexual encounter who closes his
eyes and imagines himself making love to another dilutes the present experi-
ence by introducing a vision of another, fetishizing it in the process. The
same can be said of men who have a proclivity to be attracted to a particu-
lar ‘type’ of women. Known colloquially as ‘breast men’ or ‘ass men,’ such
individuals equate the entirety of a woman with a particular physical attri-
bute, fetishizing the woman by disavowing the more defining particulars of
her being in the process. A ‘piece’ of the woman is highlighted, which then
becomes her defining feature, turning her into one of a generic class of
women (e.g. redheads), thus robbing her of her uniqueness in an effort to
render her harmless.
Some men are ‘obligatory’ fetishists in that they can only have sex if par-
ticular conditions are met, while others – quite capable of becoming ‘turned
on’ by a wide variety of attractive women – nevertheless hold out for a

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woman who is their particular ‘type.’ Taken to extremes, the pursuit of one’s
‘type’ can lead a man to date and ⁄ or marry a succession of women, all of
whom bear a streaking and eerie resemblance to one another. Addressing
the issue of a man’s having a ‘type,’ Balint (1956) asks:
Is it normal or not to demand that the love object must be tall or petite, fair or
dark, very bright or rather simple, domineering or submissive, and so on? Perhaps
we may accept the conditions just quoted as normal; [but] when they exact that a
woman limp or even have a false leg … that the woman wear black underwear dur-
ing coitus, the difficulty of drawing a boundary becomes greater.
(p. 20)
Balint raises a critical question. What does preferring redheads say about a
man, and are such preferences quantitatively or qualitatively different from
those of a man who requires his lover to have red hair before he can even con-
ceive of having sex with her? If a man gravitates to a particular type of
women, he may do so not just because he finds ‘the look’ sexy, but also
because this type of woman causes him less anxiety – which, paradoxically,
might turn out to be the same thing. In this fashion, the stipulated body part,
which is taken to represent the whole woman, comes to be used fetishistically.

The whore–madonna complex as fetish

One specific instance of a man’s proclivity to ‘type’ women plays out in the
Whore–Madonna Complex, which manifests as a tendency for men to view
women one-dimensionally as either adorable or screwable, but not both.
Women are categorized into one of two classes: ideal and pure women who
are to be loved in a wholly tender, affectionate even worshipful way and har-
lot-like women who want nothing more than to screw and, accordingly, are
viewed by these men as debased on account of their thirst for sex. Such
men feel incapable of sexually ravaging those they view as pure so sex with
such women becomes tame, civilized and half-hearted in comparison to the
unbridled passion unleashed with women of another sort. Freud sums it up
by noting: ‘‘Where they love [tenderly] they do not desire and where they
desire [sexually] they cannot love’’ (Freud, 1912, p. 183).
In a 1912 paper entitled On the universal tendency to debasement in the
sphere of love, Freud outlines his belief that the Whore–Madonna Complex
is a reaction to oedipal-based castration fears triggered by a man’s experi-
encing the affection he once felt for his mother with women he now sexually
desires. The anxiety that threatens to arise in the process of making love to
a woman who brings mother to mind is managed by the man’s finding dif-
ferent sets of women toward whom to express either his respectful affection
or his thirsty lust. There is, however, another split beside the one that sepa-
rates the man’s affectionate feelings from his sexual desires. This second
split is between a man’s love for the women he idealizes and his hatred of
the women he despises and devalues – women he wishes to sadistically hurt
or ‘‘defile’’ (p. 186).
According to Freud’s theory, a man in the grip of the Whore–Madonna
Complex will not be able to feel affection and desire, love and hate toward
one and the same woman until he works through his castration fears, at

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 Murder on the mind 151

which point he will cease to love in such an extreme and idealizing fashion
and cease to hate to the degree he once had, as he begins to experience
healthy ambivalence. As a result, his world will no longer be populated
exclusively by the pure and the defamed, madonnas and whores.
Two years before he wrote his paper on the universal tendency to debase-
ment outlined above, Freud (1910) wrote A special type of choice of object
made by men that contains a different set of ideas supporting an alternative
theory that could equally account for the Whore–Madonna Complex – a
theory more in keeping with perversion than with neurosis. This earlier the-
ory is based not on oedipal-based castration anxiety but on man’s primary
hatred of women, stimulated by the child’s sense that he had been made to
experience intolerable frustration and ⁄ or narcissistic injury at the hands of
his mother. According to this theory, in adulthood the boy-turned-man
seeks to avenge these mistreatments through sadistic attacks on women who
are stand-ins for mother.
Curiously, Freud never incorporated these pieces of the puzzle – the boy’s
overwhelming frustration and narcissistic injury, his heightened sadistic
impulses toward mother, and his thirst for revenge – into his discussion of
the dynamics driving the Whore–Madonna Complex. In this earlier paper,
Freud describes the boy’s dawning awareness that women are sexual beings,
and that mother is no exception. The realization that ‘mommy’s gotten
down and dirty with daddy’ not only interferes with the boy’s continuing
ability to envision mother in some disembodied angelic way – ‘‘a person of
unimpeachable moral purity,’’ as Freud (1910, p. 170) put it – it also causes
him to feel betrayed that she had chosen father over him to bestow such
favors – love’s original broken promise. Feeling betrayed, the child thirsts
for revenge. The boy fashions a solution that he subsequently carries into
adulthood. The boy-turned-man establishes a class of debased women
toward whom he can then express (displace) his hatred and sadism, thus
protecting his libidinal tie with the object upon whom he depends. Robbed
of interpersonal power by virtue of her perceived inferior status, the debased
woman is in no position to retaliate meaningfully, freeing the man to mis-
treat her as he sees fit. Revenge is served, and the man’s sense of potency
and worth, which had been damaged in the process of being thwarted or
narcissistically injured by mother, is restored. Whatever feelings of inade-
quacy and powerlessness he had once experienced are now experienced as
contained within the debased woman. The defensive split between whore
(debased) and madonna (elevated) also works to disavow knowledge of
mother’s sexuality, thus reversing mother’s original fall from grace, dis-
lodged from her throne of asexual purity. Maintaining a split between a
class of women who enjoy sex, and those who either do not engage in sex,
or agree to do so dutifully but joylessly as an unfortunate obligation of mar-
ried life, also helps the boy disavow knowledge of his mother’s sexual plea-
sure in doing it with daddy, which, in turn, goes a way toward relieving the
boy’s sense of mother’s betrayal. ‘‘Okay, she did it! But she had to and
didn’t really want to!’’
Freud’s original, oedipal-based theory of the Whore–Madonna Complex
views splitting between affection and sexual desire as primary – an effort to

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avoid intense castration anxiety – and heightened sadism as secondary to

the splitting – the result of a split between love and hate resulting in unmo-
derated hate. By contrast, Freud’s earlier, pre-oedipal theory views things
the other way around: sadism is seen as primary and the need to split is sec-
ondary, motivated by a wish to protect the objects upon whom one depends
from being destroyed by one’s sadistic urges. These two theories, one based
on oedipal pathology, the other on pre-oedipal pathology, not only lead to
completely different understandings and clinical approaches to the Whore–
Madonna Complex but they also reflect different points along the perverse
continuum, with the perversion-based theory resulting in a form of perverse
relatedness.

Clinical illustration of the whore–madonna complex

Those who approach relationships in a perverse fashion tend to be deeply
cynical about human nature in general (Eiguer, 1999), and about the exis-
tence of love as advertised, in particular. For them, love is ‘just some people
talking’ – nave people fooled by love’s seeming promise that individuals
actually exist who derive pleasure from satisfying others’ wishes or needs
and never expect an immediate quid pro quo in return. This was the case
with a Mr. M, a patient who, at the time of this writing, had just completed
a 15-year analysis on the couch, conducted at a frequency of four sessions
weekly.
When Mr. M first came to see me he was in his mid-20s – a recently mar-
ried business consultant who spent hours each day cruising gun-shops look-
ing for the implement of his ultimate destruction. When he wasn’t out doing
that, he spent parts of each day cutting on his arms under the desk as he
carried on his professional duties. Although he had come for treatment for
his depression and not for his perverse style of relatedness, the latter quickly
became the main focus of our work together.
Mr. M experienced his father as having been intolerably competitive with
him – as needing to prevail over him whatever the cost. Mr. M had a hazy
and unsettling memory of something having happened in the bathroom
between his father and himself when he was quite young, something sexual
in nature that served to establish the father’s power over him – to show his
son who was boss by forcing the son into a humiliating and submissive posi-
tion vis--vis the father. The only way for the patient to prevail over his
father was for his father to die, which he did early in the patient’s analysis.
The mother seemed cold and distant, unfeeling and uncaring about the
patient’s inner life. The only warm spot in the house was his nanny’s room
– a redheaded woman whom he fondly remembers as having catered to his
every need, a woman he felt incredibly attached to, until his father drove her
out of the house one day, accusing her of having inexcusably cuddled the
patient.
Mr. M had not married out of love. His wife-to-be told him it was high
time they wed and gave him an ultimatum for good measure. So the mar-
riage had started off on the wrong foot, based on his submitting to his
wife’s ‘or else.’ Married for just a few years when he began the analysis, the

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patient had a habit of pursuing a string of extra-marital affairs, typically

with redheads who were much younger than him over whom he could feel
secretly superior – women over whose eyes he could pull some wool. In the
meantime, he and his wife had children – first one, then another. The
patient felt his wife was becoming considerably more attentive to their chil-
dren’s needs than to his own, leading him to view her more as a mother
than a lover, in keeping with the Whore–Madonna Complex. Mr. M contin-
ued to have one affair after another behind his wife’s back. Getting away
with it was half the fun. Sex with his new amour was fresh and invigorating,
particularly in comparison to his sexual life at home, which had become
boringly mundane. Furthermore, having a single woman wholeheartedly
devoted to her part-time man proved narcissistically gratifying, and the per-
sonal validation provided by the woman’s singular devotion in the face of
how little she got back in return often seemed more gratifying than the sex
itself. Mr. M was heavily invested in doing whatever it took to maintain
interpersonal power over these lovers. For this reason it became essential for
him never to let any woman know enough about him so as to weaken his
negotiating position by virtue of the power that knowledge would afford the
woman.
Mr. M attributed to me aspects of his own psychology – perverse tenden-
cies to use others not only to satisfy his own narcissistic needs but also to
satisfy a perverse wish to triumph over others by prevailing in whichever
way he could over them. Relationships were always and only about the sin-
gular satisfaction of one of the two party’s needs and wishes, with the other
enlisted in the service of satisfying those needs and wishes regardless of what
the other wanted. The patient’s basic theory of interpersonal relations was
that of a ‘zero sum game’ – one person’s gain always results in the other’s
loss such that the sum of the two, equal in amount but opposite in direc-
tion, always equaled zero. A win–win situation was beyond his comprehen-
sion. In his estimation, what one person wants from another can never also
satisfy the other’s need. The patient dismissed the notion that two people
could mutually satisfy one another’s needs as Pollyanna-ish – something he
only wished were true, but knew better given all he had experienced in life
to date.
The patient thought in terms of one person ‘making’ the other submit to
his will, which was well illustrated in the transference. When I ‘got’ him to lie
down on the couch, his submissive walk from chair to couch caused him to
feel shamefully defeated while I quietly brimmed with triumphant glee. Were
he to be brought to tears in the process of sharing some painful or touching
experience, he saw me as gloating over my having ‘gotten’ him to cry – a tes-
tament to my defense-piercing abilities that left him embarrassed for having
lost control. And, were I to ultimately ‘get’ him better, it would be my victory
won, paradoxically, at his expense – proof of my clinical acumen, with him
the pawn played with no other intent than to elevate my professional status
and gratify my narcissism. Though he wished it were true that I actually
cared about his well-being, the thought seemed ludicrous given what he took
to be my self-centered concerns that left no room for any consideration of
his needs – a clear manifestation of the maternal transference.

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While this material clearly reflects narcissistic issues of the sort that often
underlie cases of perverse relatedness (Kernberg, 1992), I believe the subtle-
ties in this case can only be appreciated if seen from the perspective of per-
verse relatedness, given the extent to which the patient fetishized each and
every relationship he had with a string of different women, and his belief
that I was doing likewise with him given my ‘obvious’ interest in control for
control’s sake. Ultimately, it was the exploration of his perverse mode of
relatedness, both in his relationship with me and with women, which became
the chief vehicle for our working through these perverse tendencies.
In his relationships, the patient enjoyed wielded power and getting the
other to bend to his will. Each of his extramarital affairs was yet another
opportunity to ‘play’ the woman with her none the wiser. Each woman in
succession would take the leap and he would never correct her wishful
thinking that pictured him as being more interested in, and committed to,
her than he actually was. Her believing such things suited his need, so he
saw no reason to set the record straight. Besides, he had promised nothing
and was only guilty of having let her think what she clearly wanted to think.
Only a cad would rob her of such a delicious illusion!
The patient invited each woman to surrender to him, hinting that he
might do likewise. The perversion rested on the patient’s use of a subtle
escape clause that gave him an ‘out’– the small print spelled out in the ‘con-
tract’ that none of the women wanted to read. In this way, Khan (1979)
observes:
The pervert himself cannot surrender to the experience and retains a split-off, disso-
ciated manipulative ego-control of the situation. This is both his achievement and
his failure in the intimate situation. It is this failure that supplies the compulsion to
repeat the process again and again … Instead of instinctual gratification or object-
cathexis, the pervert remains a deprived person whose only satisfaction has been of
pleasurable discharge and intensified ego-interest.
(p. 22)

In place of love, the patient had this thing he did with women. He sold
them a bill of goods that had them feeding out of his hand. He seemed able
to seduce whichever women he wished to have, a trait I found enviable –
which, for a time, blinded me to the perverse nature of his sexual practices.
Over the course of analysis we came to understand his need to control oth-
ers. It gradually dawned on the patient that his claim to be searching for
sexual satisfaction was the least of what he was actually after. His actions
came to be understood as serving a variety of aims: (1) the narcissistic grati-
fication that came from rendering a woman willing to go all the way with
him, making the sexual act almost anti-climactic, (2) the satisfaction that he
derived in ‘playing’ the woman, and, most importantly, (3) the hostility his
actions conveyed without the woman’s ever catching on – a triumph in its
own right that served to avenge his mother’s mistreatment of him through
the use of these present-day surrogates.
The patient never loved any of these women; he never sang their praises
to me, not once. He told them he loved them, not knowing quite what that
meant aside from the fact that he loved how they made him feel and he

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knew that professing his love made him all the more powerful. His way of
relating illustrates Khan’s observation:
There are those who fuck from desire: and those who fuck from intent, the latter
are the perverts. Because intent, by definition, implies the exercise of will and power
to achieve its ends, whereas desire entails mutuality and reciprocity for its gratifi-
cation.
(Khan, 1979, p. 197)
With time, the patient tired of chasing women in this way. Doing so no
longer ‘did it’ for him. He had come to understand what he had been after,
which took the fun out of it. He came to realize the intensity of the hostility
he felt toward his mother, wife and mistresses, expressed in his way of relat-
ing. For a time he was quite angry at me not only for having spoiled the
one thing that made life worth living but also for my having exerted my
power, realizing my own goal to get him to see things from my perspective
at his expense. All this was explored in the analysis of the transference. At
this point in the treatment the patient was not quite sure which direction to
head given that perversity had been what his life had been all about.
Eventually, the patient filed for divorce. He began a relationship with a
woman quite unlike those he had previously pursued – a widowed mother
who was a few years older than him, a mature woman with whom he had a
great deal in common. For the first time in his life he was able to actually
be himself with a woman, in the same way that he had found himself able
to be with me – without having to hide behind the protective screen of
deception. He was truly amazed that such a relationship was actually possi-
ble, though it filled him with grief that he had lost decades of not having
had this kind of love in his life. Finally, the possibility of a win–win experi-
ence was not only conceivable but within reach.

Linking forms of perversion and perversity

Traditionally, fetishization has been viewed as the product of oedipal-based
castration anxiety that involves the employment of particular defenses: the
use of disavowal, used to help avoid awareness of some unacceptable bit of
reality, in conjunction with the creation of a fetish, which serves to alter this
unacceptable reality perceptually (Freud, 1927; Glover, 1933). The employ-
ment of a simple fetish, which exists at the least extreme end of the perverse
spectrum, is a defense against the anxiety triggered by the perception of a
vagina, which arouses anxiety to the extent to which it reinforces fantasies
of castration. The success of the fetishistic object to allay anxiety is rein-
forced by the disavowal of the existence of this troublesome perception. Dis-
avowal results in an individual’s simultaneously knowing and not knowing a
disturbing bit of reality. Freud’s (1927) original use of the term referred to
the disavowal of the fact of a woman’s ‘penislessness’. For some, such a
thing just cannot be, even though these individuals know full well (it would
be more accurate to say ‘half well’) that women do not, in fact, posses
penises. Disavowal of the vagina, a mechanism akin to a negative hallucina-
tion, is reinforced by the introduction of a penis-equivalent, the fetishistic
object (e.g. stiletto heels) that functions much like a positive hallucination

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(Bass, 1997) that goes beyond symbolically representing a penis by becom-

ing, through the use of a symbolic equation (Segal, 1957), the penis itself
(fetish literally equals penis). The fetishist is thus reassured that there is
nothing to worry about because here it is (the fetish ⁄ the penis) after all.
While this psychic maneuver is valuable insofar as it achieves its intended
goal, the fetishist pays a dear price to the extent he suffers a disturbance in
his sense of reality as he comes to believe in the reality of symbolic equa-
tions (e.g. fetish = penis).
The psychodynamics of fetishization just outlined strike the non-perverted
mind as fantastic. It is hard for those who employ the more familiar neu-
rotic defense of repression to imagine defenses that require such a breach of
reality-testing. Disavowal is achieved through a vertical split in one’s con-
sciousness, with the disturbing perception of the vagina relegated to the out-
skirts of preconsciousness. Because the disavowed content is placed to the
side, and is not effectively repressed as happens in neurosis, it is more likely
to catch one’s attention, and, accordingly, operates as a more looming
threat than repressed content. The presence of a fetish that occupies the
mental space previously occupied by the disavowed perception helps keep
the mind’s eye distracted, much as happens in a sleight-of-hand magic trick.
This makes fetishization a compound defense insofar as two maneuvers are
required.
What links the varied phenomena referred to as ‘perverse’ or ‘perverted’
is the disavowal of an intolerable aspect of reality (e.g. the perception of a
vagina, recognition of the interpersonal power of the potentially need-satis-
fying object, acknowledgment of a variety of conditions or situations that
might occasion any one of a number of painful affects, chiefly anxiety, terror
and humiliation), combined with the creation of a fetishistic object or condi-
tion that not only serves to reinforce disavowal but also functions as a grati-
fying and reassuring presence in its own right because it is of the fetishist’s
making and remains under his complete control. Triumphing over adverse
conditions (e.g. castration anxiety) or over one’s objects (in the case of per-
verse relatedness) contributes to the compelling excitement experienced,
which is much like, but not necessarily identical to, sexual arousal. The fe-
tishization process entails the creation of an illusion based on distortions in
one’s perception of reality – an illusion that increasingly involves the dual
processes of reification and dehumanization as one approaches the more
extreme end of the perverse spectrum – processes that turn ‘the object’, in
the object-relations sense, into an ‘object,’ in the lay sense.

The creation of an illusion: Robbing the object’s reality

via reification and dehumanization
Having established commonalities between different phenomena referred to
as perverse, let us move forward to explore the more extreme end of the per-
verse spectrum. The further one travels along this spectrum, the more com-
plete the fetishization process becomes. No longer is the fetish a mere object
or simple condition imposed on the unfolding interpersonal interaction, the
pervert’s entire attitude toward his or her object now becomes one of reifica-

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tion. Rather than having a lived experience with the other, the experience
itself is drained of its life juices – freeze-dried and internalized in the form
of a lifeless thing-memory (Dermen, 2008). Moving further along the con-
tinuum, the quality of the fetishist’s relationship to the object turns the
object into a thing to be used and toyed with to the fetishist’s delight. By
the time the situation has reached this extreme, as often happens in the case
of perverse relatedness, we are witnessing the process of dehumanization as
the ultimate in fetishization.
Dehumanization is seen by some as a central element of perversion, par-
ticularly of perverse modes of relatedness (Cooper, 1991; De Masi, 1999;
Stoller, 1973, 1979). To whatever extent the object is dehumanized in the
process of introducing a simple fetish into the relationship, this is a second-
ary by-product of one’s need to defend against castration anxiety in which-
ever way one knows best, and not the central intended effect as is it is in
more extreme forms of perversity. If a man appears insufficiently aroused by
the likes of his lover and requires the presence of a third (the fetish) in order
for him to be able to ‘get it up,’ the lover’s power to arouse is accordingly
diminished. This is but one concrete example of the way in which dehuman-
ization can rob the object of its sense of having something valuable that oth-
ers might want or need. As one moves along the continuum, the
dehumanization of the object and the fetishization of one’s experiences with
the object become more and more of a central aim, growing out of a pri-
mary need to defend against more primitive levels of anxieties (e.g. annihila-
tion). Ultimately, dehumanization becomes an end unto itself (Stoller, 1975,
1979), in which case the object is rendered pretty much worthless and dis-
missible, reduced to a mere puppet played upon the stage of the pervert’s
unfolding drama.
How might dehumanization serve as a defense against primitive anxieties?
To answer this question we turn to the work of Cooper (1991), Glasser
(1986) and Stoller (1975, 1991). For some, the raw, direct experience of relat-
ing to another – having to bear the totality of another’s being – poses a
threat insofar as it stimulates not only fears of engulfment – of becoming
swallowed up by the object to the point of non-existence – but a host of
other primitive fears arising from the power and importance of the object in
the fetishist’s emotional life – the ability of the object to frustrate and
humiliate. Dehumanization serves to protect against such threats, as outlined
by Cooper (1991) who sees dehumanization as:
the ultimate strategy against the fears of human qualities – it protects against the
vulnerability of loving, against the possibility of human unpredictability, and against
the sense of powerlessness and passivity in comparison to other humans.
(pp. 223–4)

Fetishization and manic defenses operate in a similar fashion insofar as

each flattens the inherent slope between ‘the one who needs’ and ‘the one
who is needed’. In the case of mania, the subject who needs is declared to
be no longer in a position of needing, thus eliminating the inherent prob-
lems and conflicts associated with dependency, circumventing the depressive
position in the process. In extreme mania, the one in need actually appears

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to change places with the one who is needed. Fetishization, on the other
hand, approaches the problem from a different angle. Dehumanizing ‘the
one who is needed’ results in his or her no longer being seen as having any-
thing another might want or need. Perversion operates in just this way –
obliterating differences between classes of people, chief amongst which are
differences between parents and children, teachers and students, providers
and supplicants (Chasseguet-Smirgel, 1984).
Starting with the same premise as Cooper – that perversion is triggered
by and develops out of a defense against a host of primitive anxieties –
Glasser (1986) ends up reaching a very different conclusion. His argument
goes as follows: intense annihilation anxiety begets non-hostile aggression
that aims to obliterate and negate this threat in an effort to protect one’s
psychic survival. This aggression is initially unaccompanied by a sadistic
urge to make the object hurt. Subsequent realization and concern that this
aggression might endanger one’s link to the need-satisfying object lead the
fetishist to fashion a solution to retain his bond with the object, and he does
this through:
the employment of sexualization which converts aggression to sadism: the intention
to destroy [eliminate the threat to one’s existence] is converted into the wish to hurt
and control. In this way the object is preserved and the viability of the relationship
is ensured, albeit in sado-masochistic terms.
(Glasser, 1986, p. 10)

According to Glasser’s thinking, the perverse individual’s efforts to dehu-

manize the object are not viewed primarily as a defense aimed at lessening
the object’s power or importance, as Cooper suggests, rather they are one in
a series of ways the pervert has of ensuring his safety.
Viewing dehumanization as a product of sadism is very much in keeping
with Stoller’s (1975, 1991) views on the matter, with one exception: Glasser
envisions the fetishist as concerned about the destructive effect his aggressive
attack might have on the object, worried it may destroy the relationship,
which is an issue Stoller fails to address. While Glasser takes a detour
through aggression on the way to sadism, Stoller goes there directly, bypass-
ing any concern on the fetishist’s part that his aggressive ⁄ sadistic treatment
of the object may destroy the object or drive him or her away. This is in
keeping with the theory outlined in this paper regarding the way in which
the fetishist who engages in perverse relatedness works to seize control over
the object, resulting in the potential realization of a fantasy that he or she
has taken possession of the object, rendering him or her captive and power-
less to resist or flee. ‘‘The central issue in perversion’’, posits Stoller (1975),
is the triumph that comes from ‘‘being in control while the other loses con-
trol’’ (p. 128).
Defense is all about threat and dread – slinking about beneath a teetering
boulder that might topple over at any moment felling the subject below, in
contrast with reparation-based theories (Khan, 1979; Stoller, 1975) that
envision the subject’s feeling of triumph as he pushes the boulder off the
cliff onto some other subject below. It seems unlikely, however, that a
defense that serves to keep something from happening is as likely a candi-

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date to generate excitement as processes aimed at actively causing something

to occur, thus reinforcing Stoller’s theory that posits a process capable of
generating in the fetishist an intense sense of power over his objects. Stoller
(1979, 1985) sees hostility (hatred of the object), not deviant libido, as cen-
tral to perversion. He feels this hostility not only expresses the fetishist’s
rage at having suffered past mistreatments at the hands of his or her earliest
objects – expressed through sadistic attacks on present-day objects, stand-
ins for one’s childhood objects – but it further strives to harm, defile, disem-
power and dehumanize the object in an act of revenge, thus transforming
childhood trauma into adult triumph following the formula: ‘‘I am humili-
ated; I discover revenge; I humiliate; I have mastered the past’’ (Stoller,
1991, p. 47).

Concluding remarks
There is a clear-cut danger in overextending a term to include so wide a
variety of different phenomena as to render the term conceptually useless.
The current trend to widen the usage of the terms ‘perversion’ and ‘fetish’
does seem to be at risk of such an outcome. As illustrated by the two theo-
ries Freud (1910, 1912) proposed to account for the Whore–Madonna Com-
plex, there is a distinctive difference between neurotic dynamics that rely on
repression and perverse dynamics that rely on disavowal and fetishization.
The sorts of phenomena categorized as perverse in this paper all adhere to
the classical disavowal ⁄ fetishization model originally proposed by Freud
(1927).
A final comment must be made with regard to the issue of gender differ-
ences in perversion and perversity. Classically, sexual perversions, from the
prospective of neurosis, were believed to manifest overwhelmingly in males.
This makes sense if one believes disavowal and fetishization are primarily
employed in the service of avoiding awareness of the fact ⁄ perception that
certain humans lack penises, a result of castration anxiety that men, alone,
experience. As the trend to widen the definition of perversion takes hold, as
summarized and expanded upon in this paper, castration anxiety alone
ceases to be the primary force driving perversion formation. Perversions also
arise as an attempt psychically to solve a host of problems and conflicts
arising from having to face and reconcile oneself to certain unacceptable
aspects of reality and their accompanying affects. This expanded view of
perversion, by necessity, would apply equally to men and to women.
This paper is but one in a series of papers focused on reaching a better
understanding of perverse dynamics. A great deal more work remains to be
done in order to elevate psychoanalytic understanding of perversion to the
level of theoretical sophistication achieved in the case of neurosis. Patients
who exhibit the more extreme forms of perverse dynamics, particularly per-
verse relatedness, cannot be helped by applying our theories of neurosis to
their types of pathology. Further work in this area should broaden the num-
bers and variety of patients psychoanalysis can reach through accurate
empathy that not only conveys a profound understanding of the phenomena
but also, importantly, facilitates the analyst’s capacity to withstand the

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unique and challenging forms of countertransference stirred up in the course

of treating a patient who perverts his or her relationship with the analyst.

Translations of summary
Mord im Sinn: und andere Elemente entlang des Spektrums der Perversion. Diese Abhandlung
illustriert den Umfang und die Flle des Spektrums der Perversion und Perversitt, wie es in der psycho-
analytischen Literatur gegenwrtig dargestellt wird, wirft Fragen zu den neueren Tendenzen auf, eine
Menge anscheinend unterschiedlicher Phnomene im gleichen konzeptuellen Rahmen zu erfassen und
versucht aufzuzeigen, was diese Phnomene an Gemeinsamkeiten haben, die es rechtfertigen, sie in ein
und der selben Rubrik zusammenzufassen. Das eine Ende dieses Spektrums wird dargestellt durch die
Verwendung einfacher Fetische, die in eine sexuelle Szene einbezogen werden, um die sexuelle Erregung
zu fçrdern. Wenn man sich entlang des Kontinuums weiterbewegt, so trifft man auf zunehmend komplexe
Verhaltensmuster, zu denen auch die Inszenierung von ,,Drehbchern’’ gehçrt, in denen die perversen
Phantasien realistisch dargestellt werden, oder die bernahme komplementrer Rollen (etwa in sadomas-
ochistischen Inszenierungen), die gleichermaßen den Bedrfnissen entsprechen und die Begierde der be-
iden beteiligten Parteien abbilden. Eine besondere klinische Entitt, die ,,perversen Beziehungsmuster’’,
befindet sich am extremen Ende des Spektrums und reprsentieren eine Art Verdinglichung der Bezie-
hung, die dann nur noch wenig mehr ist als ein Vehikel, um vom Objekt Besitz zu ergreifen und es zu
kontrollieren, allein zu dem Zwecke der Befriedigung der ganz eigenen Bedrfnisse und Begierden. Was
alle diese Phnomene gemeinsam haben, ist sowohl die Einflechtung eines Gegenstandes oder bestimmter
Gegebenheiten zwischen den beiden zueinander ,,in Beziehung stehenden’’ Objekten – angefangen von ei-
nem einfachen Fetischobjekt bis hin zu einer ausgeklgelten Form der Inszenierung einer Beziehung, die
den anderen zu einem Bauern auf dem Schachbrett des Perversen macht –, als auch eine alles andere als
aufrichtige Beziehung zur Realitt.

Asesinatos en mente: y otros temas del espectro perverso. Este artculo ilustra la amplitud y
profundidad del espectro de la perversin y la perversidad tal como es representado actualmente en la lit-
eratura psicoanaltica. Asimismo, plantea interrogantes respecto a la nueva tendencia a incluir una mul-
titud de fenmenos aparentemente diversos bajo el mismo paraguas conceptual, y procura demostrar lo
que estos fenmenos tienen en comffln que justifica englobarlos bajo el mismo rubro. Un extremo de este
espectro est representado por el empleo de simples fetiches introducidos en la escena sexual a fin de esti-
mular la excitacin sexual. Si se avanza por el continuum, uno se topa con patrones de conducta cada
vez m s complejos, como la actuacin de libretos que realizan fantasas perversas y la asuncin de roles
complementarios (por ej., sadomasoquismo) que satisfacen las necesidades y representan los deseos por
igual de ambas partes involucradas. En el extremo final del espectro se encuentran los ‘modos perversos
de relacin’, una entidad clnica singular que representa la reificacin de la relacin en cuanto se vuelve
poco menos que un vehculo para poseer al objeto y controlarlo a fin de gratificar exclusivamente las
propias necesidades y deseos. Todos estos fenmenos comparten la insercin de un objeto o condicin –
que va desde un sencillo fetiche hasta un estilo elaborado de relacionarse que reduce al otro a pen en el
tablero de ajedrez del perverso – entre los dos objetos ‘relacionados’, como tambi
n una relacin poco
honesta con la realidad.

Meurtre sur l’esprit: et d’autres points le long du spectre pervers. Cet article traite de la largeur
et la profondeur du spectre de la perversion et la perversit
tel qu’il est actuellement repr
sent
dans la
litt
rature psychanalytique, soulve des questions sur les tendances r
centes  inclure une foule de ph
-
nomnes divers semblant sous le mÞme parapluie conceptuel, et cherche  d
montrer ce que ces ph
-
nomnes ont en commun qui pourrait justifier de les r
unir sous la mÞme rubrique. Une fin de ce spectre
est repr
sent
e par l’emploi des f
tiches simples qui sont introduits sur une scne sexuelle afin de pro-
mouvoir une excitation sexuelle. En se d
plaÅant le long du continuum, on rencontre des patterns com-
portementaux complexes qui impliquent la promulgation des sc
narios qui concr
tisent les fantaisies
perverses, y compris la supposition des r les compl
mentaires (par exemple, le sadomasochisme) qui ali-
mentent les besoins et repr
sentent les d
sirs des deux partis impliqu
s. Une entit
clinique unique, ‘faÅ-
ons perverses d¢Þtre en relation’, se trouve  la fin extrÞme du spectre, repr
sentant la r
ification de la
relation lorsqu’elle devient un peu plus qu’un v
hicule pour poss
der et contr ler son objet pour la grati-
fication de ses propres besoins et d
sirs. Ce que chacun de ces ph
nomnes ont en commun est l’insertion
d’un objet ou d’une condition – allant d’un objet f
tiche simple  une faÅon
labor
e d¢Þtre en relation
qui r
duit l’autre en gage qui est jou
sur l’
chiquier du pervert entre les deux objets ‘en relation’ ainsi
qu’une relation moins qu’honnÞte avec la r
alit
.

Il delitto nella mente: e altri elementi lungo lo spettro della perversione. Questo saggio illustra
l’ampiezza e la profondit dello spettro della perversione e della perversit sulla base della loro attuale

Int J Psychoanal (2010) 91 ª 2010 Institute of Psychoanalysis

 Murder on the mind 161
rappresentazione nella letteratura psicanalitica, solleva questioni relative alla recente propensione a voler
includere una molteplicit di fenomeni diversi sotto il medesimo ombrello concettuale, e si sforza di di-
mostrare ci che questi fenomeni hanno in comune al fine di giustificare il loro raggruppamento sotto la
stessa categoria. Un’estremit di questo spettro  rappresentata dall’utilizzo di semplici feticci introdotti
in una sfera sessuale allo scopo di stimolare l’eccitazione sessuale. Procedendo lungo il continuum, si in-
contrano modelli di comportamento sempre pi complessi, incluso l’agito di ‘storie’ che attualizzano le
fantasie perverse dell’individuo, inclusa l’adozione di ruoli complementari (ad esempio, sadomasochismo)
che soddisfano equamente i bisogni – e rappresentano i desideri – di entrambe le parti coinvolte. Un’u-
nica entit clinica, ‘modalit perverse di relazione’, si trova all’estremit dello spettro, e rappresenta la re-
ificazione della relazione in quanto diviene poco pi di un mezzo per prendere possesso e controllare il
proprio oggetto per la gratificazione dei propri ed esclusivi bisogni e desideri. Il punto in comune tra
questi fenomeni  sia l’inserimento di una cosa o una condizione – da un semplice oggetto feticistico a
uno stile di relazione elaborato che riduce l’altro a una pedina manovrata sulla scacchiera del [giocatore]
perverso – tra i due oggetti in ‘relazione’, sia un rapporto poco sincero con la realt.

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