Perversion the Social Relation

54 Bruce Finkit also must be considered in terms of the function it serves in relation tothe law and separation. A neurotic symptom provides the patient witha certain substitute satisfaction, but it also forms, in certain instances,in order to bind anxiety; so too the pervert's activities serve a purposethat is not simply that of achieving direct sexual satisfaction. 41 Manyneurotics think perverts must be getting an awful lot more satisfactionin life than they are—indeed many analysts fall into the same trap. Thisstops them from seeing what it is that the apparent "will to jouissance,"as Lacan calls it, in perversion is designed to do, is in the service of, andis covering over.Turning our attention from the kind of father Freud often seems tohave assumed to exist—that is, the father who has no reservations aboutseparating his son from the boy's mother (the pervert being the son whoobstinately refuses to let that happen)—to the all-too-common contemporaryfather who never worked out his own problems with authority,does not believe fathers should wield authority over their children, believeschildren are rational creatures and can understand adult explanations,prefers to let his wife discipline the children, wants to be lovednot feared, and who (perhaps to boot) allows his wife to undercut hisauthority, we can begin to understand perversion from a rather differentperspective. 42Perversion and the lawOne of the paradoxical claims Lacan makes about perversion is thatwhile it may sometimes present itself as a no-holds-barred, jouissanceseekingactivity, its less apparent aim is to bring the law into being: tomake the Other as law (or law-giving Other) exist. The masochist's goal,for example, is to bring the partner or witness to the point of enunciatinga law and perhaps pronouncing a sentence (often by generatinganxiety in the partner). While the pervert seems to be able to obtaina kind of "primal satisfaction"—transcending his own subjective divisionas a subject of language (who like the rest of us speaking beings isnot supposed to be able to obtain more than a mere pittance of jouissance:as Lacan tells us, "jouissance is prohibited to whoever speaks"[Écrits, 821; 319]), and finding a kind of wholeness or completeness neuroticscan only dream of or fantasize about—anxiety in fact dominates