Marty, François

The Risks of Perverse Development - 2006.


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Perversion is an essentially narcissistic pathology. Since S. Freud, it has been considered to be an emanation of infantile sexuality through regression or fixation at a pregenital level, and as a method of treating castration anxiety. Fetichism provides the perfect example. It constitutes a failure to overcome the oedipal conflict to the degree that it denies the difference between the sexes and generations and blocks the process of subjectivation. Perversion organises itself in an incestual context and is manifested at moments of severe narcissistic frailty such as those which can occur at adolescence. Based on the presentation of a case of narcissistic perversion, the author demonstrates the importance of (narcissistic) cathexis of partial objects which brings about the failure of the intersubjective relation and also shows the nature of bonds existing between perversion and addiction by the way in which object-loss anxiety is managed. The difficulty of treatment lies in the risk of a perversion of transference and the perverse subject's resistance to tolerating the presence of a third party in his psychic universe.