Perversion the Social Relation

Bruce FinkPerversionDesire is a defense, a defense against going beyond a limit in jouissance.—Jacques Lacan, ÉcritsModern psychiatry, for its part, has not in any way expanded our under-' standing of perversion. Doing what Freud tells us it does best, givingnew "names to different [behaviors] but saying nothing further aboutthem" (SE XVI, 260), 1 psychiatry has simply provided a panoply of newterms to describe the particular objects that turn people on: pedophilia,frotteurism, toucherism, transvestic fetishism, and so on. 2Lacan in contrast, is able to help us better understand the nature of4 perversion with his crucial distinctions between the imaginary, the symbolic,and the real, and between desire and jouissance. If neurosis canbe understood as a set of strategies by which people protest against a"definitive" sacrifice of jouissance—castration—imposed upon them bytheir parents (attempting to recover some modicum of jouissance) andcome to desire in relation to the law, perversion involves the attempt to* prop up the law so that limits can be set to jouissance (what Lacan calls"the will to jouissance"). Whereas we see an utter and complete absenceof the law in psychosis, and a definitive instatement of the law in neurosis(overcome only in fantasy), in perversion the subject struggles to' bring the law into being—in a word, to make the Other exist. As usual,Lacan's work here grows out of Freud's, and thus I shall begin my discussionof perversion here by taking up some of Freud's distinctions.