Perversion the Social Relation

Perversion 49Lacan tells us, we come into the world offering ourselves up as partialobjects to the Other's desire (Écrits, 582; 225), hoping to be the objectof the Other's desire, to win the Other's desire; and the pervert—whose father's desire is not terribly pronounced it would seem—"identifieswith the imaginary object of [his mother's] desire, insofar as sheherself symbolizes it in the phallus" (Écrits, 554; 198). In other words,the imaginary object of the mother's desire here is the phallus—not as adisplaceable symbol, in the sense that the mother might desire, say, allthe trappings of status, all socially valorized objects, or a husband (orboyfriend or whatever) who resembles socially accepted images of "realmen," sometime "possessors" of the phallus, but as an unsymbolized,nonfungible, undisplaceable object—and the child attempts to becomeit for her. He attempts to be her little prized possession, her little substitutepenis, as Freud might have put it, and the father often does notcare to interfere (perhaps preferring to be left alone) or is ineffectual inhis attempts to interfere.We can represent the pervert's situation as shown in Figure 1.PerversionNeurosisf a) Other )When we compare this configuration with that of neurosis, we see thatthe pervert's "subject position" does not entail something outside orbeyond the Other. Instead the pervert, as subject, plays the role of object:the object that fills the void in the mOther. A first division in theOther has occurred for the pervert, graphically speaking: the Other isnot whole; his mOther is lacking in something, wants for something.To the question, "What am I?" the pervert responds, "I am that," thatsomething she is lacking. Thus, for the pervert, there is no persistentquestion of being—in other words, no persistent question regarding hisraison d'être.To separate the boy from his mother here would entail forcing him tostop being the phallus so he can have it, stop being the imaginary phallusin order to obtain a symbolic one (through the father's recognition