God carried away writing these up in Word, highlighting the best phrases, then lost all the drama and yellow in the copy/paste. Sad day.
“Perversion in the context of multiplicity and discontinuity is a discursive construct that, when examined, begins to fall apart…” (826)
“Anxiety…is like a blow on the head—it stops you from thinking. To write a coherent essay, you have to think in a straight line. To write notes, you jig and jog, zig along until you meet anxiety and then zag away in another direction, hoping to come back to that anxious spot from another angle, sparking this thought here and that feeling there and that idea way over there, hoping that this little bit of fireworks will end in a pattern of power and significance.” (826)
~Do you? Not totally sure this applies. Sometimes the best writing comes from the lack of a straight line, or any line, or the concept of linearity. I often write in circles, nebulas, amorphous spaces in which ideas simply flow and convalesce all at the same time – timelessly, even.
““We all have an edge, a place where we are bothered.”” (Tisdale via Dimen)
“…however empathically the pervert patient is comprehended, the pervert is still the other guy doing alien and even disgusting albeit (or therefore) fascinating things. Perversion may be defined, after all, as the sex that you like and I don’t.” (827)
“Perhaps perversion brews anxiety because…we depend on it to hold what we cannot bear to remember about ourselves. It fascinates endlessly because it serves psychic and social functions…”
“…perverse practices redress the ancient humiliations of childhood. For the family, perversion siphons off aggression, serving as a scapegoat by containing the cruelty and hatred threatening family integrity and security. By thus preserving the family, it conserves a cultural cornerstone and, therefore, society itself…At the same time…perversion, by soaking up the anxiety and aggression brought on by oedipal rigors, safeguards heterosexuality and, therefore, the species.” (828)
"A moment of anxiety. Don't mention children and perversion in the same breath" (828)
“In the matter of mind—as opposed to body—to pathologize is simultaneously to identify the illness that needs cure and to stigmatize the badness that causes shame…“There is something wrong with me” is a cry of shame, the narcissistic injury for which there are no words—the injury that, because it inhabits the Real and lacks representation, often turns concrete, mutating into psychical or physical harm to self or others…the power to name, the power to shame” (829)
~naming and identification – pathology, naming, difference – are we doomed to pit things against one another simply by identifying them as individual things? What are the implications here for individualism vs collectivism?
“The inability to sustain loss, inadequacy, castration, and death; troubles of identity, of the fusion of ego and non-ego, of the differentiation of self and other—these issues, unresolved, may find expression in perverse sexual practices.”
~Do we assume that the differentiation between the self and others is inherent, or learned? How would perversion express, not express, or express differently if we didn’t differentiate between the self and other, or conceptually separate ins and outs and ups and downs and this and that and you and me and us?
"The pervert wishes to obliterate the distinctions on which psychic structures and social orders depend. The pervert makes a double erosion, of the difference between the sexes and of that between the generations... Disorder is created, and, as borders are violated, pollution prevails" (830)
“Nowhere to be found, however, is the analyst who reflects on the personal and clinical (not to say cultural) meaning … of her feelings, who in the chaotic clinical mix of part-selves might be able to identify with the patient. Absent these dimensions of the analyst’s subjectivity, the patient’s subjectivity finds no purchase. Subjectivity is a shared state of mind.”
“The analyst needs her theory of perversion (if this is a concept she requires in order to think about sexuality), but she also needs to know both what she feels about perversion—its affective meaning to her and the values embedded in that meaning—and what those perverse practices mean to her patients.” (833)
"Maybe you don't like perverse sexual practices, but that's not your business... Trying to hold all my responses in mind, I negotiate between acceptance and rejection, attraction and repulsion, curiosity, disgust, and boredom - a sort of guarded neutrality, if what we mean these days by neutrality is some point of balance…" (833)
~polarizing, either/or instead of both/and – if one is between these things, grappling with them, can one really call that a neutrality? A balance? Seems more like a teeter totter?
“Benjamin’s (1998) proposal that recognition of that other subject is the point of the psychoanalytic process seems spot-on. That this recognition takes place through affect…complicates matters. Affects, to come at the problem from the other side, are by nature intersubjective.” (832)
“What he did not see, and what the second wave of feminism, especially psychoanalytic feminism, did, is that the sexual order to which the aberrations and perversions were central is equally a gendered order…gender is “no longer a consequence”…of mind or body or culture but a principle informing all; it is “everywhere and nowhere”…Produced by patriarchy and heterosexuality, it is also always a matter of power—an argument too long and complicated for me to make here…–but a fact that certain psychoanalytic applications of gender theory tend to forget."
““The sexual perversions . . . are pathologies of gender stereotyping” (p. 196). Look at it this way: If gender as an elemental structure of dominance and subordination is so critical to psyche, soma, and culture, is it any wonder that we think of perversion as inevitably sadomasochistic?” (835)
“If, as Goldner (n.d.)…told us, “one-third of all [heterosexual] women will, at some point in their lives, be physically assaulted by an intimate male partner—slapped, kicked, beaten, choked or attacked with a weapon” (p. 6), that makes physical abuse almost normative for the culture in general and for heterosexuality, marriage, and (given that abuse is no stranger to homosexual households either) even attachment in particular. If aggressive sex and eroticized aggression are so at home in the nuclear family, can we say that the abnormal is at home in the normal? Freud’s joke about wife battering is a joke about power that also performs power, and the performance is patriarchal.”
"When he says to his readers, "Look, you may think that this perverse desire is beneath you, you may think only lower types like peasants engage in it, but the truth is that you, the civilized, want it too," he simultaneously liberates and imprisons, frees by naming and binds by shaming" (837)
“Perversion is culturally constructed… perversion links with a set of meanings and practices that render each other intelligible and habitable. To label something a perversion is simultaneously to identify something else not perverse. The normal, what does not need to be said because it goes without saying, serves in this discourse as a residual category.”
"In the discourse of psychosexuality, perversion and heteronormality constitute each other's limits. Perversion marks the boundary across which you become an outlaw. Normality marks off the territory that, if stayed inside, keeps you safe from shame, disgust, and anxiety" (838)
“”Every expression of [the sexual instinct] that does not correspond with the purpose of nature—i.e., propagation— must be regarded as perverse”…The normal is the heterosexual, the coital, the reproductive...penis in vagina, vagina around penis, with seminal emission uninterrupted.” (838)
"One job of psychoanalysis is, after all, to reveal to the suffering the thing that, denied, sickens them" (838)
"To rewrite Laplanche and Pontalis… "It is difficult to comprehend the idea of the norm otherwise than by reference to a perversion."” (843)
"Perverts do hate the truth, he insisted, but what truth is that?... Bronski suggested, because the pervert is always on the outside, always the other: "The 'truth', as it is so carefully and lovingly called, is almost always what is held as a cherished belief by those in the dominant culture: those with power, those who have the power to name - and, as it follows, to name-call." Truth, in Foucauldian view, is an effect of power, a form of domination… " (842)
“As what we may call the relational turn has taken place, a new psychoanalytic and probably cultural normality has been erected and, along with it, a new clinical goal—not the derepression of forbidden desire but the healing of the mutilated capacity to love. As a oneperson psychology has given way to, or at least moved over to accommodate, a two-person psychology, fetishism, like perversion, becomes interpretable in intersubjective space.”
"At the same time, this redefinition of normality is an act of imperialism. Speaking from the center of psychoanalytic power, of disciplinary authority, it colonizes the sexual margins, allowing the conventional to own the unconventional without any of the risks of unconventionality. In a royal co-optation of the sexual revolution, Love Relations renders perverse erotics acceptable, but only under the condition that it be practiced by that guardian of nonconformity, the heterosexual, married couple" (851)
“Speaking from the center of psychoanalytic power, of disciplinary authority, it colonizes the sexual margins, allowing the conventional to own the unconventional without any of the risks of unconventionality.”
“They exemplify the worst tendencies toward domination; toward naming, blaming, truth framing, and shaming; in effect toward stigmatizing and the participation of psychoanalysis in the cultural morality governing it”
"I am concerned, as I said earlier, with psychoanalytic participation in domination - in naming, blaming, truth framing, and shaming. You might think of this psychoanalytic re-creation of the cultural morality producing it as a sort of aggression" (851)
"The label of perversion is as clinically superfluous as we now understand the label of homosexuality to be. It is not a diagnostic category; it does not tell us what to do. Now we take our clinical cue not from disorders of desire but from struggles of self and relationship - splits in psyche, maladies of object love, infirmities of intimacy" (853)
"The effort of loving him, even as he wards me off with gestures and sentiments soaked in hatred, echoes my struggle to negotiate between the love speech of naming and the hate speech of blaming; the depressive position being always in precarious balance, love and hate are never far apart, and intimacy is always both challenged and made possible by aggression" (855)
"There are many routes to sanity, maturity, sexuality." (855)
~Oof, I don’t like these being equated, or even placed on the same level. Is sexuality maturity? So much culture discourse argues that the repression of sexuality is maturity or sanity. Just so, a child might argue that maturity is insanity. The subjectivity of truth rings clearly here.
"Chodorow …wisely connected perversion and liveliness: "If we retain passion and intensity for heterosexuality, we are in the arena of symptom, neurosis, and disorder; if we deperversionize heterosexuality, giving up its claim to intensity and passion, we make it less interesting to us and to its practitioners" (p. 301)" (855)
"Perversion, Ogden argued, shows up in analysis as a defense against deadness, even if his prescription was the family-values usual... Are there no other ways to represent life, exuberance, passion, and pleasure besides reproductive heterosexuality?" (856)
~Queer Joy would say Hell No. But this really does start on an interesting question of what it means to have/find/be joy(ous). Can queer joy even be real joy if it comes about as a product of oppression? What does this say about the nature of happiness, joy, of the cultural constructs of a “good life”, being a “productive” citizen, etc.? When I think of joy, I don’t immediately think of things which are inherently normative, but rather of the things outside normativity where I delight in the difference, the uniqueness. If joy comes from normativity, then what is it I feel when I resist the desire to repress my perversions?
"There needs to be a way to back off from the authoritarian and dominating inclinations that psychoanalysis shares with other regulatory practices. Remembering doubt is one route; writing disruptively is another" (856)
"How different from the certitude of marking Love Relations, a seamless narrative that seems to wrap everything up in the service of truth but also hides all the loose ends. Notes pull on those threads, rupture the surface coherence, or at least I hope they do" (856)
“What, after all, is pathology? 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. If all sexualities may claim wholesomeness, if all have a valid psychic place, then all are subject to the same psychic vicissitudes.” (857)
"And who's to say that there's something wrong... something wrong with that... something wrong with you?" (857)
