Working with Sexuality: Bodies, Desires and Imagination

The Role of Violence in Sexual Perversion

This presentation argues that perversion serves both a defensive and destructive function. The patient with a perverse psychopathology operates a paradox: he knows something and does not know it. These two attitudes are held simultaneously and yet are apparently reconciled, and an internal world is created in which reality is distorted and misrepresented. The perversion arises in an attempt to create this false reconciliation between contradictory ideas that can no longer be kept separate and it is when the perverse solution proves inadequate to contain the patient’s internal conflict that violence erupts. Ronald Doctor describes a male patient who uses cross-dressing as a perverse solution to his outbursts of uncontrollable violence.