What Is Perversion? Between Structure, Stigma, and Symbolic Transgression

The term perversion has always occupied a complex, and often controversial, place in psychoanalytic theory. Originally formulated within a medical and legal context, it was Freud who introduced the idea of perversion as part of the normal spectrum of human sexuality, arguing that neurotic and perverse tendencies stem from the same infantile sources. Yet as psychoanalytic thinking evolved, so too did its conceptualization of perversion — sometimes as a defensive structure, sometimes as a creative act, and more recently, as a contested site of cultural meaning.

Today, psychoanalysts find themselves negotiating a tension between classical structural theory and contemporary, queer-informed readings of perversion. At stake in this debate are questions not only about sexuality, but about how we define the boundaries of psychic health, identity, and freedom.

Freud and the Origins of Perversion
Sigmund Freud famously wrote that we are all “polymorphously perverse” in childhood — open to a wide range of bodily pleasures and objects of desire. In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), he argued that perversions are not aberrations, but early developmental paths that become fixated. The perverse subject, unlike the neurotic, does not repress the drive, but acts it out in behavior. Thus, Freud’s theory was radical for its time: it de-pathologized non-normative sexuality, but still framed perversion as developmentally regressive.

The Structural Turn: Perversion as a Psychic Defense
Later theorists, particularly in the post-Freudian and Lacanian traditions, emphasized the structural nature of perversion. Perversion became more than a sexual behavior; it was seen as a mode of organizing the psyche in relation to the law, the Other, and the symbolic order.

Jacques Lacan interpreted perversion as a particular relationship to the Law: the perverse subject does not reject the Law, but positions themselves as its instrument. In this sense, perversion is not lawlessness, but a twisting of the symbolic in order to sustain a fantasy of jouissance (enjoyment) beyond prohibition.
Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, in contrast, offered a more conservative and moralized reading. She saw perversion as a narcissistic defense against psychic growth, especially the capacity to mourn and accept castration. In her influential works (The Ego Ideal, Creativity and Perversion), she argued that the perverse subject denies psychic reality and attempts to reshape the world according to an omnipotent fantasy — thus blocking symbolic development.
In these classical theories, perversion is not celebrated but problematic: a rigid defense against difference, limitation, and the symbolic function of the Other.

Queer Theory and the Reclamation of Perversion
From the 1990s onward, queer theorists began to reclaim and rethink the notion of perversion. Rather than viewing it as a pathology, they explored how perversion might challenge normative assumptions about gender, sexuality, and identity.

Leo Bersani, in Is the Rectum a Grave?, questioned the idea that non-normative sexuality must be justified or redeemed. He argued that the destabilizing potential of sexuality is what makes it subversive — not something to be pathologized, but to be affirmed as a site of resistance.
Lynne Huffer, drawing on Foucault and Lacan, asked whether psychoanalysis could support a “queer ethics” — one that embraces ambiguity, nonlinearity, and the limits of the self, rather than enforcing a developmental ideal.
Tim Dean, in Beyond Sexuality, makes the case that perversion in psychoanalysis can be read not as a failure to develop, but as a refusal to submit to normative desire. In this view, perversion is not a deviation from health, but an alternative mode of relationality — a “truth of desire” that does not need to conform to Oedipal standards.
Between Pathology and Possibility
These tensions point to a central dilemma in psychoanalysis today: Is perversion a symptom to be analyzed, or a mode of being to be honored? Should psychoanalysis uphold a developmental model of psychic health, or open itself to plural conceptions of subjectivity?

While some clinicians (particularly in Kleinian or Lacanian circles) still frame perversion as a structure of defense — often linked with denial, omnipotence, and a resistance to mourning — others, informed by queer and post-structuralist theory, see perversion as a creative form of psychic negotiation, especially for those whose identities fall outside the heteronormative framework.

In practice, this means that the analyst must be especially attuned to the function of perverse expressions: Are they shielding the patient from unbearable truth, or enabling the subject to inhabit truth differently? Do they foreclose meaning, or open new symbolic possibilities?

Conclusion: Perversion as a Mirror of Psychoanalysis Itself
Perversion, then, is not just a category of diagnosis — it is a mirror held up to psychoanalysis itself. It reflects the discipline’s own struggle between normativity and liberation, between structure and desire, between the law of the father and the freedom of the drive.

To engage with perversion today is to ask: What kind of psyche does psychoanalysis aim to support? One that adapts to reality as it is, or one that dares to remake it?

The answer may depend less on theory than on clinical listening, and on the analyst’s own willingness to sit with the discomfort of what cannot easily be named.

Suggested Reading
Freud, S. (1905). Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality.
Lacan, J. (1958). The Signification of the Phallus.
Chasseguet-Smirgel, J. (1984). Creativity and Perversion.
Bersani, L. (1987). Is the Rectum a Grave?
Dean, T. (2000). Beyond Sexuality.
Huffer, L. (2010). Mad for Foucault: Rethinking the Foundations of Queer Theory.