Perversion the Social Relation

Perversion 59sions—when allowed to pursue their own course—move toward creatinga world in which the psychotic is assigned an important place, acritical role. The psychotic's delusional cosmology serves to explain thewhy and wherefore of the psychotic's birth, and the purpose of his orher life on Earth. Thus, it too attempts to tie word to meaning, like thepaternal metaphor.Consider the case of a very young boy I know whose mother had destroyedthe boy's father, demanded complete loyalty from her son (nevertiring of telling him that he would have trouble finding a wife later becauseof his special relationship with his mother), put him in her bedevery night, and never revealed her genitals to him or said anything tocorrect his belief that both men and women had what he called "a ball"(his term for a penis). In order to have him, his mother had decided toget pregnant without consulting the father, a man she had just begundating; she later told the boy his father had abandoned him because hedidn't love him (when she had actually driven the father to suicide).A therapist has a number of options in such a case. He or she canwait, and hope the child articulates something that will transform themother's unbearable presence and demands (the mother as real) into aspeakable, bearable reality (the mother's desire as named), but the therapistthen runs the risk of abandoning the child to psychosis or perversion.Or the therapist can invent an explanation: "Your father very muchwanted a little boy like you, and asked your mother to have his child.Since your father's death, your mother has been very scared and upset,and holds onto you as a reminder of her lost husband." 51This is not merely a construction—it is a calculated lie. But with sucha lie, if it is introduced after a strong relationship has been establishedbetween therapist and child, and does not blatantly contradict too muchof what the child has heard about the absent father, the therapist createsan important place for the father in the mother's world and therebynames her desire. In other words, if the therapist is successful in makingthis construction stick (and I have seen it work), the therapist transformsthe mother's demand for the child to give her all of her satisfaction inlife with the whole of himself—transforms it into a desire, a desire forsomething else, for the father or something about the father that the boycan then try to fathom.This construction will contradict certain things the mother says, but