Polymorphous and perverse questionings: identifications, anxieties, defenses, and personal history and play

Abstract

This work aims to trace in the history of childhood, identifications,and defenses against anxiety, aspects that in clinical practice present themselves with characteristics of «the perverse. » From Freud’s notion of the perverse-polymorphous disposition to vignettes that bring to the fore the description of sexual drive with its essential characteristics, there are occasions when the question arises as to which erotic behaviors would be considered perverse, and which would not. Sexual games, the use of elements to maintain sexual pleasure, multiple transvestism, and transgender identities in search of an identity response that alleviates an ever-present suffering and discomfort. Thus, patients who, in the world of relationships, present a fundamentally neurotic psychic structure, resolve to open up their partners, engage in threesomes, cross-dress without giving it a sexual charge –or they do–, intervene in their bodies in a rather «strange» way to eroticize and be eroticized. They acquire sexual toys both purchased and spontaneously taken from their history. In their fantasies, but also in their acting-out passages, they come with the urgency to initiate hormone processes until they reach the point of being operated on and becoming transgender... An abundance of suffering arrives at the consultation, insufficiently interrogated, with  a concreteness that accompanies countless ailments in the body, with acting-out passages where violence is predominant and the feeling of loneliness impossible to calm.