LECTURE 1
January 7, 1972

PERVERSIONS

Self Psychology Page | Chicago Institute Lectures Forum | Preface

DR. KOHUT: It's a very, very interesting topic. I don't know whether you have had any experience yourselves in the treatment of perversions. Personally, I have had the impression more and more that the approach to perversions is not really most fruitfully undertaken by seeing them in the context of drive psychology, particularly in the context of pregenital drive psychology. Now, it's obvious, of course, that with many perversions we're dealing with the exercise of, enjoyment of, what have you, of a pregenital drive component. I think the great contribution that Freud made in the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality was showing that drives undergo a development, that they are precursors of the full-blown, mature, genital organization, that there is a sequence of dominant enjoyment possibilities, if you wish to say it psychologically, or erotogenic zones, if you wish to say it biologically. That is an enormous contribution and undoubtedly teaches us a great deal about what's going on in the perversions.

In other words, one could, in terms of a psychology of drives, define the perversions as the fixation on, or regression to, a particular precursor of the genital organization. So I think that the traditional way of seeing their perversions - go back and read the unsurpassed exposition of the perversions in the first series of Freud's Introductory II Lectures - holds that first there are primitive, earlier forms of enjoyment, then some progress toward genital organization and the deep and intense conflicts and anxieties of the Oedipus complex, and then a regression. And you will also remember that Freud said that in a sense the neuroses are the negative of the perversions. That is, what in the perversions is openly enjoyed and consciously experienced becomes in the neuroses the underlying layer against which the symptoms are essentially, a defense. I don't have to remind you of the like relationship between the obsessional neuroses and the anal-sadistic drive components that underlie them..

Of course, a host of problems is raised when one reviews the material in this particular way. First of all, the question is raised, why do some individuals develop neuroses while other people develop perversions? Second, an enormously intriguing question to me has always been the mystery of the intensity of the pleasures experienced in perversions. When one thinks about the structure of the perversions in the way I have described them to you, I've always had the feeling that what was missing in this wonderful and complete and systematically consistent explanation is the intensity of the pleasure gain that every perverse activity provides. When you talk to a person engaged in one or another form of perversion, he will assure you most of the time that the intensity of the pleasure surpasses anything that is otherwise imaginable. That it is different from orgastic pleasure in full, genital enjoyment. As a matter of fact, there is something much more irresistible in the urge toward the exercise of a perversion than there seems to be in the drive toward genital satisfaction.

Genital satisfaction is, of course, a very, very intense drive. The height of genital stimulation is in late adolescence when, the drive is perhaps at its strongest. It becomes -- and you know the struggle of adolescence with masturbation -- an enormously strong urge. It seems to me, at least from what I've observed, that the intensity of the perversion, the drive toward the pleasure gained in the perversion, is even more intense than the urge toward genital satisfaction. In other words, genital satisfaction is more under the control, more mastered by, the decision- and choice-taking ego than is the perversion. In other words, the perversion very frequently has the quality -- and there is no question about the similarity, the relatedness of the conditions -- it has the quality of an irresistible addiction. And addictions and perversions in that sense, if not in many other senses, are very closely related to one another. The person who is driven toward a particular perversion -- and I don't mean playing around with pregenital urges, which is a very different story from a built-up and systematically organized perversion -- is driven to it, I think, with the same intensity, and experiences a similar or at least related type of pleasure, as the person who is addicted to a drug or whatever.

Now, it seems to me that these features in many of the perversions - this may not be ubiquitous - warrant a somewhat different or broader explanation than the one that is solely based on the vicissitudes of drive, drive fixation, and drive regression. Why is the ego in the perverse urge so helpless, when it is comparatively more in charge vis-à-vis the genital drives? Why can the delay be tolerated so much less easily in perversions and addictions than it can with regard to the genital drive? It's often been said, it's an old theory, that pregenital urges allow sublimation while the genital urge does not. This has been doubted, this has been questioned. I don't know what's right or what's wrong with it, but even if those who question this particular theory are on the whole right, this is still a tenet that holds true: that at least for the average human being genital sexuality is not sublimated, but pregenital urges allow themselves to be translated and channeled into all kinds of other activities. But, if anything, this fact seems to prove or support the suspicion that a perversion is something else or something additional or something thing somewhat different than the mere exercise of pregenital part instincts.. Because those pregenital part instincts that are sublimatable are not those of perversions but are present secondarily, as passed-over stations of libidinal development in the normal, or more or less genitally developed, individual. There are those, then, in whom the pregenital drive components can be used in two ways - in foreplay, as an admixture to normal genitality, and in sublimations into all kinds of nonsexual pursuits. I don't have to remind you of the visual aspects of sexuality or the still very sexual curiosity that is a precursor of scientific investigative interests, or interests in painting, or what have you.

What I am driving at is that the perversions need an explanation in which broader aspects of the total personality are considered. There are broader psychological phenomena than we can possibly define by just looking at drive development, drive fixation, and drive regression, even if we take into account the intensity of the oedipal experience and regression from it because of severe castration anxiety or ambivalence conflicts. Such issues may be historically important in this, that, or the other individual, but I do not believe that either the helplessness of the ego vis-à-vis the pregenital addictive urge or the intense, irresistible quality of the pleasure experience could possibly be an explanation of it all.

Now in all honesty, I cannot tell you a great deal about it.. I simply do not have such a broad clinical experience at my disposal. But no one analyst could possibly have. That's one of the disadvantages of our profession. You know, what we gain in intensity in a detailed investigation, we lose in variety and in the number of cases. And one can never make a claim in science about something one has not seen; one can only make a claim about things that one has seen. So I cannot tell you how many forms of perversion there are that do not fit my particular outlook on them.. I can only claim with certainty that a good many perversions I've encountered in the last few years do fit it. Actually I've not seen many frank perversions, but I've seen perversions as subsidiary symptomatology, and I have come to the conclusion that at least certain perverse symptom complexes, syndromes, can be explained - and I think make much more sense when they are so explained - as sexualized versions of structural defects. In other words, the structural defect (a) explains the particular weakness vis-à-vis the urge and ((b)) less importantly, explains the intensity of the need. And it seems to me that in an addiction or a perversion the intensity of the urge is accounted for neither by the structural defect alone nor by the pregenital fixation and regression alone but by the convergence of both. It is the convergence of the sexual pleasure-gain of the pregenital part-instinct, added to the irresistible quality of the need to fill a structural defect, that makes the urge so intense and so irresistible..

You may remember Case A in The Analysis of the Self.¹ It is a long case demonstrating an idealizing transference, in which for the first time to my own satisfaction, I recognized that what seemed to be a sexual fantasy was not only that but also the description of, psychologically speaking, a particular mode of attempting to feed a structural defect. I am thinking of this particular case, although what I am saying here now has validity, so far as I can judge, for all perversions. Again, I am not saying this out of some kind of a false modesty, I can only make claims about those cases I've seen, only those I've studied. I cannot say that there are not other perversions built up according to different models. I think it likely that there are any number of perversions that are much more built up according to the level of the transference neurosis paradigm. In the latter cases, the essential issue is regression from highly anxiety-provoking or very conflictual oedipal situations and the saving of the psyche. I do not think that such perversions cover a simultaneous structural defect such as the perversions I have encountered, where defect is written all over them. I am referring to narcissistic personality in which the perversion is embedded.

You remember the basic psychopathology in Case A. According to my interpretation, this particular individual suffered a structural defect because of the loss of the father at a time when the internalization of the father imago was not yet securely anchored, even though this loss occurred comparatively late in this patient's life, at the transitional point leading into the latency period. There may have been, of course, earlier determinants to his problem, that is, while earlier incorporations were feeble and vulnerable. With this patient, certain aspects of his superego were well defined, well laid down, and in good contact with the rest of his personality. But these aspects were mainly contents of the superego.

The point is that Mr. A had a set of standards; he knew what he was after. The set of standards was very clearly the set of standards of his family. It was a traditional set of standards: earning a good living, playing a moral role. In other words, this was something that one ought to do, not only something that one wanes to do. It was not that the urge to earn a lot of money was so important, but this was part and parcel of the accepted mores of achievement. It was somewhat immoral not to make a good living; there was an ethical flavor to doing the right thing. That there were a variety of standards that formed a nucleus of this particular superego content does not mean that the content has to remain unaltered; in the course of a lifetime, we do change the content of the superego. But, when you come right down to it, these changes are simply dusters and alterations of the original that were laid down via the strong, admired father image.

What this patient lacked was an approving flavor in the relationship between the superego and his own ego. Although he could live up to his particular standards, it didn't nourish him to live up to them.. He remained unsatisfied. That is, his superego did not have the capacity to supply him with narcissistic sustenance that merging into it should have provided him. Under normal circumstances, ego and superego relate in the same way in which the child formerly related to the idealized parent imago. The idealized parent imago is not only the quintessence of all perfection morally but is also the quintessence of all perfection in the sense of knowledge and power. By doing what the idealized parent imago wants you to do, you are accepted into it, you partake of its power, and you feel narcissistically in balance.

This is the complex that is revived again in those people who have not internalized what I call the idealizing transference. In other words, the idealizing transference is not a projection of an idealized superego onto the analyst. This kind of idealization happens in every analysis. Rather, it is the reenactment of an archaic state of two socially separate people in which the one needs to think himself merged with the other in order to be powerful and in narcissistic balance. Now this particular individual, Mr. A, was just of that kind. He needed actually to form a relationship with someone whom he idealized in addition to living up to his own internalized standards. He needed other people to tell him "Yes, you did right. Yes, you were fine. Yes, your work is good. " He needed that kind of thing to an inordinate degree. He was addicted to it. Again, you could quite rightly say, "Don't we all want approval, don't we all want to be confirmed?" All this means is that the usual internalization processes in most of us are not complete, because one always needs an extra little buttress on the outside. It is the same with the punitive functions of the superego, which are very grossly reinforced by the police, by the law, by judges, by the judicial system. If we had a total internalization of our own self-punitive functions, then we would never need any further police.

CANDIDATE: Dr. Kohut, I wondered whether you might just take a moment. It may just be my problem, but there's something about the concept of merger, especially its differentiation from a projection, that I still don't feel I've gotten hold of. Are you talking about a merging with an idealized image, that this is an intrapsychic experience, and one feels part of, associated with, some nourishing aspect of it?

DR. KOHUT: Let me give you two experiential examples. That always helps me best when I get myself lost in abstract thought.. I always try to come back to what I consider to be the parallel with an experiment in physics and biology, the thought experiment. The experiment is the empathic thinking over, actually living through, of situations in one's mind and being empathic with such situations. In our field I consider this to be the empathic thought experiment, very similar to the experiment of the physicist manipulating physical objects in order to concretize thought. Right away, I think that concretizing thought in physics, in biology, is, in most instances of significant experiment, what the experiment itself is for. Other small experiments are of a different nature, but decisive experiments are concretization of thought. The thought comes first and then the experiment limps along after. I'm talking about the great experiments, the ones that establish new modes of science and new outlooks.

Let me take two examples. Both are in The Analysis of the Self. One is on an adult level, the relationship of the true believer to his omnipotent God. Prayer, devotion, and religious experience of certain types allow the participation of the true believer in some superior power; he achieves that kind of narcissistic balance. Now let me take the other example, on the fringe of the nominal. It's a fringe example but it is obviously something that belongs in normal psychology. Take the example of somebody who is terribly upset. And he comes to you for sustenance but he's in a state, but not because of a structural defect that has existed from early life on. He comes because one of his experiences has become so destructive to him, so upsetting to him -- some dreadful thing has happened to him -- that at the present time his narcissistic balancing capacities are totally out of kilter. He's suddenly threatened with a total loss of fortune or he discovers that his wife is unfaithful to him or whatever it may be. He may be going to be called into a court of law and lose all his standing in the community and he's totally overwhelmed by it..

Under those circumstances, the empathic friend will do nothing more, and shouldn't do anything more, at first, than allow him to merge with him. That is, he will do the same thing the empathic mother does with her child. You show him that his anxiety is understood. That is the first step that enables the other person to begin this particular merger. You indicate to him, by your behavior, that you are the receptive organ for the merger. But then comes the all-important next step. The mother does this by picking up the child, physically holding the child dose. So that the child now, in a sense, loses his own individuality and merges with the empathic mother, who has begun this merger by taking over the anxiety of the child. However, she takes it over in a modulated way and that is the important thing. A mother who says, "Oh, for goodness sake, don't cry, there's nothing to be anxious about," does not allow this particular kind of merger and does not help the child. She rejects and pushes the child away. A mother who goes to pieces over the child's anxieties also doesn't encourage the merger. Why? Because why do you want to merge into something that is as anxious as you yourself are, or even more so? A mother who misunderstands the child and thinks that he's anxious when he's in pain or in pain when he's anxious is also no good. That is why empathy is the bridge for this kind of a merger and why empathy, to some extent, is a sublimated form of such merger experiences.

But assuming that a slight opening has been made, a total merger is now encouraged by the mother and by the understanding and empathic friend. The mother picks the child up. What does the friend do? The friend puts an arm around the other's shoulder and imitates the picking up. Although he may feel like a small baby, you put your arm around him and say, "I know how you must feel. " But, while you're saying I understand how you must feel, you yourself are not going to pieces and are not anxious. Feeling your calmness while you are united with the other person allows this person now to merge with you. You, at this particular moment, are a symbol, a replica, of the early, idealized, omnipotent object. And then the distraught friend feels better, not because he's been persuaded that the future is bright, but because he has taken over your intact, narcissism-providing influence. The same is true, as I said, when the child is being carried by the mother, and there are a variety of other experiences that I could use to describe what the merger experience is about.

This is very, very different from projecting something onto another person: when somebody comes into the analytic session and thinks the analyst has frowned and the analyst knows that he has not frowned. Then it turns out that the patient says something like, "By the way, you know, in coming here, I avoided paying the bus fare." So he feels a little guilty. But then you have an idea. He saw the analyst frowning, and you think, "This is a projection of an inner structure. " Now, surely, there are always some transitions because, of course, the inner structure was based on earlier experiences in which merger played a role. But the question is, where is the major emphasis? O.K., is that satisfactory to everybody?

Now we'll go back again to the perversions. In the perversions, the major underlying urge is the attempt to fill in the structural defect. And filling in the structural defect is a need. Since it is an early need, it is much closer to sexual experience than later needs that are more under the dominance of the ego. Early needs, early desires, are always closer to the sexual experience because the younger the child is, the closer he is to the intensities of the pleasure experience, to what later on one calls libidinal and sexual. Freud, as you know, used the term "libidinal" for all those things. Walking was a libidinally pleasurable thing; looking, babbling, and talking were all originally sexual experiences. But here I'm talking about a need for an aspect of the psychological structure that has not been laid down. And such needs are enormously intense because, psychologically speaking, they are really a matter of life and death.

As you remember, this patient, Mr. A, had a very clearly circumscribed sexual fantasy. In fact, he had a number of standard fantasies. This was one of them that occurred over and over again. As you know, this was not a man who acted out sexually; he was not a man in whom the perversion played a highly significant or very dominant role, although he was quite ashamed of it. This man did not act out, apart from things that, I remember, he did as a young adolescent. He did something that most adolescents do. There was some homosexually tinged friendship, some games were played that were to some extent precursors of the later fantasy. But in the particular sexual fantasy, which you may all remember from reading this particular chapter in The Analysis of the Self, he generally started out by buying one of those physical cultural magazines. You know, pictures of husky, muscular men, and that became the starting point of a particular, almost routinized fantasy in which he subdued a husky man by some kind of a clever maneuver. Then he fantasized having the man tied up against a post or in some way with a chain -- these were not standard but could be varied -- and he masturbated the helpless man. Then, at the moment of the man's ejaculation, he himself felt an enormous sexual gratification. He felt something of triumph and mixed strength and so on. It was this particular sexual fantasy that had an addictive, irresistible quality. In the later part of the analysis there were times when he felt disappointed in me, in my sustaining him narcissistically, because I was leaving or had not been empathic. And at such times there was a recrudescence of the fantasy, and we came to understand what the fantasy stood for.

You should recall the technique I described in other lectures here. I do not generally advise one to use sexual fantasy or the explanation of the dynamics leading up to it.. I don't want to go into these technical reasons. I think there are good reasons why one does not do that, at least not early in treatment.. For one thing, one almost encourages the revival of the wish, the need, for the sexual gratification rather than getting away from it.. To put it another way, such fantasies are not made for insight; they are made for enjoyment. But, in retrospect, one can, as it were, counter the regressive moves toward them by a retrospective explanation of them. Then one can explain these things to the patient in the total context of a broad understanding, but this cannot be done when the patient first begins to report them. At the beginning you would say, "I wonder why this came up now. " Then you would come to the transference and would show how the fantasy is a part of the transference and point out that the patient was driven to it. Then you go into the explanations of the transference in the total context but not in the sexual, symbolic context.

What Mr. A was symbolically doing, of course, was the following: the husky man, the object of his sexuality, his sexual fantasies, was a stand-in for the idealized omnipotent, archaic father imago, and Mr. A was draining the father imago of that strength and internalizing it by masturbating him. And, I think, there is one preconscious link, although I never embarrassed him by insisting that it become conscious. He was a fragile man. But in other instances I have no doubt that this was the case. There was a preconscious link of a fellatio fantasy, that he swallowed the semen of this particular powerful man. In other words, masturbating the man and draining him of his strength was the first step; then the second step was to incorporate his semen until magically, as it were, the patient was suddenly warmed up and filled with strength via the bridge of swallowing the strength, the sexual substance of this powerful man. But the whole thing was nothing but a symbol, a sexualized version, of his need to internalize safely this particular kind of power of the narcissism-providing, idealized father.

Now, this had to be worked out in the transference in the nonsexual theme. Only after it was fairly far along in the working through process in the nonsexual field, could the dynamics and genetics of it be discussed with him in detail.. It was better, I found, to wait until later to talk about its graphic details, almost to protect him against his helplessly having to return to this fantasy again once the imagery was reactivated.

At the end of the analysis, and really this is a remarkable example - in all my experience I've never seen a more beautiful parallel of metapsychological formulation, a sexual version and a nonsexual one. And I don't think there is much doubt that there are many cases of perversions, much more significantly explained in this particular way than simply in terms of drive psychology. When you have drive psychology only, what are you left with therapeutically? What leverage do you have? One kind of leverage, probably. The ego is strong and resists the drive. However, ego psychology refrains from calling this a prohibition against the fantasy. It calls it by a nicer name - strengthening the ego. But, in essence, that It is all it comes to.. It is as though you tell the patient, "Be strong now and don't do that anymore. Find your pleasure some other place. Be strong, don't be so anxious, and don't run toward things that are childish. Be more mature." You know, essentially this is the only leverage you have in earlier theory. I don't mean to say that it is a negligible one. Therapeutically, however, it is a totally different leverage from the kind I'm proposing. I am proposing a leverage of true psychological transformations, not the gross identifications with the analyst that are encouraged by prohibitions. "Be like me," you say to the patient, ""Listen to me." And then you have a subsidiary superego that, to some extent, ties the patient to the analyst forever. Now, by contrast, we have something that can be worked through; minute quantities can be worked through over and over again with the building of the structure, which then really changes the balance, just enough. And three cheers for the little difference. That alteration of the balance of forces via rather small internal changes sometimes changes [the self] a great deal.

Now, what I said here about this particular form of homosexuality is also true for other forms of homosexuality. It is also true for many other perversions. Take, for example, the exhibitionistic perversion. Of course, one could easily get led into grotesque ways of thinking in which one sees secondary gain as the primary issue. Of course, it is true that you can tell somebody with an exhibitionistic perversion that all he wants is approval from people. You can say in effect, "You show your penis and all you want is to have the admiration of your mamma by showing the penis." But this would be total nonsense. In the last analysis, however, in a sense that formulation is still all right.. It's only wrong in the first analysis, you see. In the last analysis, the need for approval does indeed drive the exhibitionist. But it is not just a magical gesture, and you will have confused the secondary gain of an illness with a deep, primary need [for structure] that is its essence.

I have to be very brief now in order to get to something that we really need hours of discussion of. I refer again to the case of Mr. A in The Analysis of the Self. There it is used as a paradigm of the terminal phase of the analysis, the reconcretization of that phase, if you recall. Mr. A is the fellow who, at the very end of the analysis, again temporarily had these crude, concrete fantasies or dreams in which he swallowed the clarinet and it played inside him. And then, in effect, he swallowed the analyst. Again, the power. And an X-ray was taken and, lo and behold, who was sitting in his bowels? The little analyst was sitting there.

He also had a dream that I don't think I described in the book. In this dream he was tied to some kind of an orthopedic frame, buttocks up, and somebody was pointing a finger closer and closer to his anus. And there, again, was the anal penetration. In other words, what had gradually been internalized in a manageable, small, bit-by-bit processes of internalization over the years of analysis had again become temporally concretized in terms of anal penetration, anal incorporation, oral incorporation, or what have you swallowing the analyst whole again. He wanted the analyst to penetrate him.

So the case is a beautiful example of the meaning of a homosexual perversion in terms of the structural needs and the wish for penetration because of the lack of a real opportunity for the necessary idealization of the father and the gradual debunking of the father. That wasn't accomplished in the patient's early life, and it became reactivated and worked through in the analysis. And then, at the end of the analysis, with the loss of the analyst about to occur, the old archaically sexualized needs for the idealized father were revived, and the sexualized imagery of internalizing the father analyst were revived. Reflecting the stress of ending the analysis, the analyst became in his dream a part of him, somewhat unmetabolized at that point, but part of him nevertheless. And not to be taken away from him when the analysis was over.

Well, I have to leave early today, and it was very virtuous of me to come here on short notice anyway. So I hope you at least enjoyed this brief presentation. I will probably be around again sometime during the course of the year. Until next time . . .

¹ Kohut, 1971. The Analysis of the Self. New York: International Universities Press.

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