Perversion the Social Relation

44 Bruce Fink' the law." This particular formulation applies better to the masochistthan to the sadist or fetishist, as we shall see, but suffices to indicate* that disavowal implies a certain staging or making believe regarding thepaternal function.Refusing the sacrificeThe notion of sacrifice or exaction is certainly not absent from Freud'swork on perversion, and one of the places we see it most clearly isin Freud's discussions of the "splitting of the ego." A splitting of the"* ego, Freud postulates, occurs in perversion, not in neurosis. In neurosis,contradictory thoughts are situated at different levels, in different agencies.For example, "I want to sleep with my sister-in-law" is repressedand persists in the unconscious, while the idea "I don't want to sleepwith my sister-in-law" is what becomes conscious. 17 In perversion, onthe other hand, the ego itself splits (SE XXIII, 204), and contradictoryideas—a woman both does and does not have a penis—are maintainedside by side in the same agency. 18 Freud refers to this as a partial "turningaway from reality" (SE XXIII, 277) by the ego, a procedure he wouldprefer to reserve for psychosis. Yet the description he provides of thecase on which he bases his notion of splitting (SE XXIII, 276-78) differslittle from cases of repression; for, in the former, the repressed returnsin the guise of two symptoms (the man's fear that his father will punishhim for continued masturbation, and "an anxious susceptibility againsteither of his little toes being touched"). Symptom formation requires, asFreud himself teaches us (SE XVI, 358-59), two different agencies thatare at odds—ego and id, or conscious and unconscious—and we seemto have neither more nor less than the conditions of neurosis here: thesplitting of the "I" (Ich) into conscious and unconscious due to repression.But let's take a closer look at this supposed case of splitting to seewhere renunciation comes in ("instinctual renunciation," as it is translatedin the Standard Edition, though it is a question of renouncing thepleasure provided by the drives). A young boy, early "acquainted withthe female genitals through being seduced by an older girl," takes pleasurein touching his own genitals after relations with the older girl arebroken off. One day his nurse catches him doing it and tells him hisfather will "cut it off" if he does not stop. Freud tells us: "The usual