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Perversion Is Us?: Eight Notes

Perversion challenges one's intellect, passion, clinical practice, and cultural and personal values. As a topic, it also generates anxiety—a problem addressed in this paper by an experimental literary format. Perversion is conventionally deemed a self-evident, pathological entity. From the perspective on multiplicity and discontinuity taken here, however, its familiar meanings fall apart at the seams, yielding new questions of theory and technique. Criteria of mental health, standards of morality, and power structures are shown to intertwine in the discourse on perversion. Recent theological and clinical work on this topic by Bach, Chasseguet-Smirgel, Kernberg, and Khan, valuable in certain ways and problematic in others, is assessed and historicized. A claim both classical and iconoclastic is made: If perversion can coexist with health, if its status as illness varies with cultural time and place, then, conversely, any sexuality may be symptomatic, or healthy. Put another way, sexuality has nothing inherently to do with mental health or mental illness.