PERVERSION: ‘YOUR BALLS OR YOUR LIFE’ – LESSONS BY

ESTELA WELLDON

Paul Verhaeghe

abstract This paper highlights three important combined subjects in Estela Well-
don’s theory: perversion and depression, perversion and anxiety and perversion and
motherhood. The underlying argument is that annihilation anxiety is central for the
pervert and not castration anxiety. This annihilation anxiety goes back to a particular
relationship between mother and child, which explains at the same time the ever-
present threat of depression.

Key words: Estela Welldon, perversion, motherhood, depression, annihilation

anxiety

About ten years ago, I was one of the speakers at the annual CFAR con-
ference in London. The month was November and the weather conditions
matched the topic of the conference which was Depression. I knew most of
the speakers and their work so I knew more or less beforehand what they
would be talking about. Awaiting my turn, I was listening to the talks in a
mode of free-floating attention, as it is politely called. Suddenly someone
took the stage whom I did not know. Moreover, she combined certain
concepts in a way that was for me totally new and utterly unexpected, that is,
depression and perversion. She did this in a very convincing manner with a
commanding voice, making it obvious that everything she said was based on
long-standing clinical experience.
I still remember three things vividly. First of all I started to take notes in
a feverish way because she talked like a Spanish fury. Afterwards I learned
that South-American fury was more appropriate. I still have those notes, and
when I went through them it was obvious that this talk changed my under-
standing of perversion completely. Secondly, I rushed to the bookstall at the
conference to buy the book she had referred to during her talk. I still have
that copy of Mother, Madonna, Whore (Welldon 1988), and I remember
reading it on the Eurostar back home, writing notes in the margins. Thirdly,
I remember that I went to her at some point during the day, to ask a number
of things and to tell her how impressed I was. Indeed, until then I only had
clinical experience of perverse traits mainly in neurotic patients. I was quite
familiar with Lacan’s theory on the perverse structure, but was not able to
sound the clinical depths of it. This was the first time that I could really

paul verhaeghe phd is Professor and Chair of the Department of Psychoanalysis,

University of Ghent, Belgium and author of On Being Normal and Other Disorders
(Karnac, 2008). Address for correspondence: [paul.verhaeghe@ugent.be]
© The author
Journal compilation © 2009 BAP and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road,
Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. 183
184 BRITISH JOURNAL OF PSYCHOTHERAPY (2009) 25(2)

connect Lacan’s abstract theory with a genuine and original clinical

approach which was embedded in another conceptual, Anglo-Saxon frame-
work. Without exaggeration I can say that the chapter on perversion in my
book on psychopathology is based by and large on the impact on me of
Estella Welldon’s rich clinical theory (Verhaeghe 2008).
What did I learn from her? She deeply influenced my views on three
combined subjects. Firstly, perversion and motherhood. Secondly, perversion
and anxiety. Thirdly, perversion and depression. Finally, the three of them
come together in a new understanding of Eros and Thanatos, the life and
death drives, as they operate in the structure of perversion. I want to go a bit
more deeply into these and their implication for Freud’s final drive theory.

Perversion and Motherhood

Combining the concepts of motherhood and perversion made Welldon
famous. To my knowledge, she is the first clinician who demonstrated that
perversion can only be understood if we look at motherhood and also
reconsider female perversion. The importance of this clinical insight cannot
be overrated, and it testifies to three things – first of all, to her intellectual
courage; secondly, to her sense of humanity; and, last but not least, to her
clinical brilliance.
To publish a book about motherhood as the seat of perversion in the
feminist climate of the time was just another way of trying to commit suicide
by proxy. With hindsight, it is almost a miracle that the book was actually
published and read. It goes against two visceral certainties: that mothers are
always saints and that women are never perverse. Welldon confronts us with
another reality, not caring whether it is politically correct, as long as it is
clinically correct. And correct she was and is. Beyond the mainly boyish
ideals of saintly motherhood and the feverish phallic masculine ideals of
sexy femininity, there are real women with real problems who are totally
different from both the romantic and the erotic universe of the male. It took
courage to put that forward against both traditional patriarchal and contem-
porary feminist views.
One of the reasons why her book became more and more accepted must
have to do with its second characteristic, that is, her deep sense of humanity.
In spite of the fact that she is telling us about dreadful situations and
horrendous parenting, she never falls into the trap of the all too easy blaming
of mothers. On the contrary, when she describes the study of perversion
through three generations, she makes it quite clear that we are addressing
three generations of trauma, that is, three generations of victims who unfor-
tunately try to solve their problems by passing them on to the next genera-
tion. To condemn them as monsters is something for the tabloids and the
only moral judgement that I have found in Welldon’s work is addressed at us
and our attitude. As Welldon herself said in her talk today: ‘We have to keep
PAUL VERHAEGHE 185

in mind that judgemental situations are of no use and are the expressions of
intellectual laziness’. The clinical vignettes in her writings demonstrate time
and again how she managed to offer her patients both concern and genuine
interest, making it possible for them to talk about their anxieties and com-
pulsions in a way that had not been not possible before.
This is her clinical finesse alongside her intellectual courage and sense of
humanity. Until her work, most studies on perversion started from an a
priori moral judgement disguised as a clinical certainty. The fact that this
certainty could take two completely opposite versions added a tabloid
flavour to the discussion but was not at all helpful for the patients. In the
dominant version, the stories of these patients about their childhood and
their parents were considered to be imaginary distortions based on uncon-
scious desires and defences against them. Indeed, the master himself, Freud,
had to admit as early as 1897 that he could not make a distinction between
real and imagined seduction memories (Freud 1892–99, letter to Fliess dated
21 September 1897). The other version is a reaction to the first one, and tells
the opposite story: the patients are nothing but poor victims of malevolent
monster parents, and in a kind of conspiracy a number of therapists refused
to acknowledge these forms of abuse and treated their patients as neurotics
with too much imagination. This version was put forward by Bass and Davis
(1988). It amounted to the ‘recovered memory therapy’, in its turn contra-
dicted by the ‘false memory movement’.
Again, with hindsight and based on what Welldon has taught us, it is
obvious that in both versions the patients were not really listened to. In the
dominant version, it was not seen that abused patients are totally different
from the case studies of neurotic patients presented by Freud. In the other
version, the pseudo-humanity in the therapists was so overwhelming that
they could only recognize either victims or perpetrators, ignoring the fact
that clinical reality is always much more complex. Indeed, most perpetrators
have been victims themselves, and a number of victims cope with their past
by becoming perpetrators.
Discoveries oblige us to correct our previous theories. In the case of
perversion, these ‘theories’ turned out to be shared misconceptions and
prejudices. Today, the idea that perversion can be reduced to the sole effect
of unconscious fantasies has mainly disappeared, and Welldon’s theory that
it is largely related to traumatic reality is now recognized. Less accepted is
her theory that perversion has nothing to do with the male/female relation-
ship and everything with the mother and child relationship. Still surprising is
the idea that perversion has nothing to do with sex or with sexual drive, but
everything to do with Eros and Thanatos. The latter is without doubt the
most difficult subject, and for lack of time I cannot develop it here (see
Verhaeghe 2001a, 2001b).
Ten years ago, when I was listening to Estela Welldon’s talk, I was studying
Lacan’s theory on subject formation. At that time it had already become
186 BRITISH JOURNAL OF PSYCHOTHERAPY (2009) 25(2)

clear to me that the idea of an original self was an illusion, that our psycho-
logical identity is completely determined by the big Other, who presents us
first of all with the image of our body during the mirror stage, continuing
with signifiers in a never ending dialectical exchange through which our
subjectivity is constructed. In this conceptualization, there were two things
that I understood intellectually without really understanding them clinically.
First of all, in Lacanian theory the central figure is the father; there is not that
much room for the mother and, if there is, she is always a threatening
character. One of the rare positive instances where she appears is in the
mirror stage, where she provides the infant with its very first layer of identity
via the body (Lacan 1977[1949]). For Lacan this is an imaginary identifica-
tion, meaning that it is not clear whose body we are talking about, the child’s
or the mother’s. It was not clear for me either. The second thing I knew
without really understanding it concerned the importance of this process.
What is at stake is nothing less than life itself, that is, life as a human subject.
In the words of Lacan, the child is presented with a choice that is no choice
at all: ‘La bourse ou la vie’ – this is the age-old robber’s device, ‘Your money
or your life’ (Lacan 1994[1964], ch. 16). Either the child identifies with the
mirroring presented by the mother and hence with her desire, or it refuses to
do so. In the latter case, the child will not be able to develop an identity as a
subject, meaning that there is no real choice.1 Concerning the subject of
perversion, a better translation might be ‘Your balls or your life’. Indeed, as
I will explain, the fundamental anxiety of the perverse patient concerns the
loss of his life as a subject.

Perversion and Anxiety

This brings me to the second combination of concepts that I learned from
Welldon, namely perversion and anxiety. The anxiety that we are tradition-
ally acquainted with is castration anxiety with the father in the position of
authority. This anxiety concerns a sexual demeanour that is in one way or
another related to our forbidden oedipal desires concerning our mother.
This Freudian scheme still holds more or less for the neurotic structure, but
it never works for perversion. The reason why it does not work is to do with
the two corrections I have described: perversion is not about sex, and does
not concern the male/female relationship. It has everything to do with
becoming somebody, some separate body with a separate identity in relation
to the mother.
The implications of this part of Welldon’s theory go very far. To start
with, we cannot escape the conclusion that castration anxiety is not the
primal anxiety. There is an anxiety preceding it. Moreover, this anxiety is
the only one in perversion; the perverse subject lacks the luxury of cas-
tration anxiety. To some extent, Freud must have foreseen this when he
described disavowal as the typical mechanism of defence in perversion.
PAUL VERHAEGHE 187

Indeed, disavowal denies castration and believes in a separate world where

the mother is lacking nothing at all. The problem is that she is lacking
nothing at all because she fills this lack with her child, thus reducing it to
a part of herself. This explains the overwhelming nature of anxiety on the
part of the child and the future pervert-to-be, leading to what Welldon has
called the ‘disavowal of annihilating destruction’. This is a truly existential
anxiety, not an anxiety about death, more an anxiety about not coming
into existence in the first place.
To some extent, we have all lived this experience, albeit with a happier
outcome. In order to exist we have to pass via the mother, literally and
symbolically. We find our first existence in her body, in her gaze and in her
desire. That is why our first anxiety is separation anxiety, we cannot exist
without her, again both in the literal and in the symbolic sense. During the
mirror stage as described by Lacan, the mother provides us with the basic
representations that brought us psychologically into life, that is, life as a
human subject. Once this base is safely installed and once the oedipal
structure is on its way, we can leave this separation anxiety more or less
behind us. From that period onwards, we will concentrate on a new toy and
a new problem, the phallus and the ever evolving sexual relationship.
This is not the case for the pervert. He does not even experience separa-
tion anxiety. A better expression is annihilation anxiety, annihilation by the
mother who has all the power in her hands and who can destroy what she
brought into life in the first place. This explains what in forensic psychol-
ogy today is called ‘thrill-seeking’. This idea needs some reframing. The
perverse subject is not so much looking for thrills as looking for something
that makes him feel alive because he is forever in doubt about that. The
task which confronts a perverse subject is truly impossible. He or she has
to effect his or her own symbolic birth, independently of the mother
because this mother will never allow independence. As is obvious from
Welldon’s clinical vignettes, this explains the need for a second skin, even
for a Houdini box in which the patient feels safe and from which he can
emerge on his own. It explains why the mother’s body, and especially her
pregnant body, is the main object of attack, because that is what the
subject needs to escape from.
But how can you escape from something or somebody that you need at
the same time? You need it because there is no life without it. But if you give
in, you have no life either. I think it is utterly impossible for us to imagine, let
alone to live with, this double bind form of anxiety with which the perverse
subject is confronted. It is impossible for him as well, hence the necessity for
impossible solutions, with the role reversal between victim and perpetrator
being the most prominent one. Indeed, this is one of the best kept secrets in
clinical and forensic psychology: that a number of former victims cope with
their past by becoming perpetrators themselves. If you can’t beat them, join
them.
188 BRITISH JOURNAL OF PSYCHOTHERAPY (2009) 25(2)

Perversion and Depression

This annihilation anxiety explains the close affinity between perversion and
depression which is the third combined concept I learned from Welldon.
Depression as we have understood it since Freud’s paper on ‘Mourning and
melancholia’ is based upon the loss of a part of our ego, that is, the loss of a
part of our identity (Freud 1917e). That is why depression confronts the
patient with a kind of emptiness inside him or herself. Painful as this is, in
most cases we still have enough other identificatory layers in our identity to
recover. In perversion we find the same elements, albeit with one very
important difference: it is not a partial loss of part of identity, it is the loss of
identity as such. As Welldon put it in her talk: ‘Since the mental representa-
tion of being wanted and/or desired was never present, we are unable to talk
about a sense of loss, although this is very much connected to the fear of
aphanisis, in other words, anxieties concerning annihilation.’ The ‘dreaded
black hole of depression’ is the point where the primal anxiety of the pervert
proves to be true, that is, where annihilation takes place, leaving the perverse
subject as a naked organism without an identity. This can only be described
as a psychic death that has to be avoided at all costs and against which the
usual manic defences of the perverse patient are directed. The latter idea,
perversion as a manic defence, is another of Welldon’s theories.
Finally, these combined concepts of perversion, motherhood, annihilation
anxiety and depression lead us to an understanding about the paradox in
which the pervert is trapped. This paradox is about the life and death drive.
In Freud’s theory the Eros drive aims at a return to an original synthesis or
symbiosis and causes increasing levels of tension. In opposition to this, the
Thanatos drive aims at separation and falling apart, thus reducing the
tension level to zero. For us banal, normal neurotics, Eros promises the
dream of a return to the forever lost union with our first object. For the
pervert this is the dreaded slipping back into a never fully resolved symbiosis
with the mother where there is no possibility of a separate existence. Here,
life drive means death. The death drive confronts us with the inevitable loss
of the other, turning us into longing creatures who are always looking for our
lost counterpart. For the pervert, the death drive means freedom at last
because it brings the desired independence of the other. Here, death drive
means life.
To conclude with Welldon’s words: the pervert is dancing with death in
order to get a life.

Note
1. In the meantime Lacan’s theory on the mirror stage has been empirically con-
firmed by contemporary attachment theory (see Fonagy et al. 2002).
PAUL VERHAEGHE 189

References
Bass, E. & Davis, L. (1988) The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of
Child Sexual Abuse. New York, NY: Harper & Row.
Fonagy, P., Gergely, G., Jurist, E. & Target, M. (2002) Affect Regulation, Mentaliza-
tion, and the Development of the Self. New York, NY: Other Press.
Freud, S. (1892–99) Extracts from the Fliess Papers. Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 1, pp. 175–282. London: Hogarth, 1978,
p. 259.
Freud, S. (1917e) Mourning and melancholia. Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 14, pp. 237–60. London: Hogarth.
Lacan, J. (1977[1949]) The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I. In:
Ecrits: A Selection, pp. 1–7. New York, NY: Norton.
Lacan, J. (1994[1964]) The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. J.A.
Miller, trans. A. Sheridan. London: Penguin.
Verhaeghe, P. (2001a) Subject and body: Lacan’s struggle with the real. In:
P. Verhaeghe, Beyond Gender: From Subject to Drive, pp. 65–97. New York, NY:
Other Press.
Verhaeghe, P. (2001b). Mind your body and Lacan’s answer to a classical deadlock.
In: P. Verhaeghe, Beyond Gender: From Subject to Drive, pp. 99–132. New York,
NY: Other Press.
Verhaeghe, P. (2008). On Being Normal and Other Disorders: A Manual for Clinical
Psychodiagnostics. London: Karnac.
Welldon, E. (1988) Mother, Madonna, Whore: The Idealization and Denigration of
Motherhood. New York, NY: Guilford.