Part-Objects and Perfect Wholes: Clinical Stances on Perversion

Abstract

This article explores the tension in current psychoanalytic practice between
Freud’s libidinal model of psychosexual development and contemporary
emphasis on “whole object” relatedness. Judgments about mental health
(perversion) no longer refer to the fate and organization of the “component instincts,” but to the relational suffering of the individual. While accepting the desexualizing implications of the “attachment sea change in psychoanalysis,” Dimen resists reduction of the sexual to the relational, preferring, in the spirit of Freud, to keep clinical space open for sympathetic curiosity about the details of the patient’s sexual life, its genesis and provenance.