Some Aspects of the Psychopathology of Sex Perversions.

Importance of the study of perversions.Precipitating causes. The attempt to explain them by the association of ideas or by simple conditioned reflex is inadequate.Perversions are found to be the persistence of morbid reactions of infantile life.The sex perversions have the same general causation, and the same mechanism as the other psychoneuroses.THE ESSENTIAL FACTOR IN CAUSATION IS THE FEELING OF DEPRIVATION OF LOVE: this interpreted biologically as well as psychologically.Infantile sensuousness is to be regarded as biologically egoistic and not sexual. Its transference to the uses of sexuality later.The perversions are not the mere persistence of these normal infantile tendencies but are morbid reactions to abnormal situations. These morbid reactions are further repressed, which accounts for the fixation and arrest of sexual development.The precipitating conditions arouse the latent repressed tendencies, which therefore emerge in the form in which they were originally repressed.