Welldon, Estela (2014) The true nature of perversions. Australasian Journal of Psychotherapy, 32 (1). pp. 8-39. ISSN 1446-1625 (Print)

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Abstract

The current article explores that dangers may be encountered if a prospective patient is not ready to take on either psychoanalysis or any other psychotherapeutic intervention, partly due to the influence that the acquisition of insight into what lies beneath the perversion may have on the patient. Since behind every perversion is a non-resolved mourning process, its awareness may produce either a serious depression with suicidal ideation or a psychotic breakdown. We could say that the perversion acts as an active avoidance of emotional suffering, and that is why they (the perverse patients) are so resistant to face any psychotherapeutic treatment that will challenge them and eventually provoke the mental agony that insight inflicts in them. People suffering from perversions take many serious risks from which they also experience or derive a great sense of excitement that acts as reinforcement that they are still alive. This flirting with danger clearly describes the unconscious mechanism at work that may appear in the countertransference processes when the analyst/psycho therapist feels unwittingly titillated, mesmerized, and seduced by the patients' psychopathology.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Countertransference, Insight, Psychoanalysis, Suicidal Ideation
Subjects:	Criminology > Forensic Psychotherapy
Department/People:	Honorary Staff
URI:	https://repository.tavistockandportman.ac.uk/id/eprint/879

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