Perversion the Social Relation

Perversion6jto all cases); but morality is never detached from its medium: the parental voice thatexpresses desire and/or anger (passion or jouissance) even as it expresses a moralprinciple.46 A comment made recently by a Pittsburgh judge.47 Lacan draws many a link between castration and the sexual act for men. See in particularhis discussions in the second half of Seminar X—above all the class given onJune 19,1963.4$ For example, the myth of the libido as the "lamella" in "Position of the Unconscious"in Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink, in Reading Seminar XI: Lacan*$ Four Fundamental Conceptsof Psychoanalysis, ed. Bruce Fink, Richard Feldstein, and Maire Jaanus (Albany:SUNY Press, 1995), 273-76.49 A recognition, however small, by psychoanalysts of the importance of language andof the paternal function will hopefully lay to rest the kind of approach to perversiontaken by an object relations theorist like Sheldon Bach who, regarding sadomasochists,proffers the following banality: "One might say that these patients haveto some degree failed to adequately integrate the mother of nurturance and the motherof frustration, or the mother of pleasure and the mother of pain" (Bach, The Languageof Perversion and the Language of Love [Northvale, N.J.: Aronson, 1994], 17).50 The answer is provided in the fundamental fantasy.51 The therapist would likewise do well to explain sexual difference, with pictures ifneed be. And in a case such as this one, the therapist would be advised to tell theboy that, since his mother does not have a penis, she tries to get one from a man,and failing that, from her son. The point is to indicate that there is something a manhas that she wants: she desires something outside herself, for she is lacking in something,something that can be named. Nothing is more anxiety provoking than a lackof lack.