Perversion Now!

"At a time when surface behaviour is increasingly used to frame diagnostic categories, it is all the more important to return to a structural clinic following the ground-breaking work of Freud and Lacan. This superb collection of essays takes us beyond the dominant social norms used to characterise sexual life, and focuses instead on underlying structure and subjectivity. Broad in its scope - ranging from clinical cases to literature, art and film - it allows a new understanding of perversion, challenging received views of human conduct and exploring the questions of desire, loss, anxiety and pain at the heart of embodied existence." (Darian Leader, President of the College of Psychoanalysts) "NOW is the moment to be versed in perversion. Conventional gender stereotypes are challenged, gender is fluid, sexual norms vanish, trans rights [are]the new civil rights frontier-only perversion is left for us to be different, it seems! ...this compelling collection challenges[s] the morally loaded notion of perversion to reveal a universal structure, neither unnatural nor morbid, in fact the very foundation of sexuality. Internationally recognized psychoanalysts and scholars contribute to this consistently thought-provoking, wide-ranging volume, an invaluable resource to psychoanalysts, psychologists, researchers, sexologists, or to anyone concerned with gender, sexuality and identity." (Patricia Gherovici, psychoanalyst and author)

This collection, written by leading Lacanian psychoanalytic theorists and practitioners, explores the impact of shifts in contemporary culture, politics and society on the notion of ‘perversion’, which has undergone numerous profound changes in recent years.This collection, written by leading Lacanian psychoanalytic theorists and practitioners, explores the impact of shifts in contemporary culture, politics and society on the notion of ‘perversion’, which has undergone numerous profound changes in recent years. The book explores a wide range of issues, from changes in the psychoanalytic clinic, to transformations in the relationship between ‘transgression’ and the law; from the epistemic and diagnostic status of ‘perversion’ as a term, to the perverse turn in contemporary politics; from representations of perversion in cultural productions, to the interpretation of perverse cultural practices. Topical and controversial, academics and students of psychoanalysis, critical and cultural theory, and media studies will find this collection invaluable. In providing cutting edge theoretical debate, the book will also be attractive to practising and training psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists.