Sergio Benvenuto: Perversions are not Paraphilias

The psychoanalytic and psychiatric (DMS) diagnostics on perversion nearly coincide, even if psychiatry prefers to use the euphemism “paraphilia.” But do analysts and psychiatrists both know exactly what they are talking about? And in our times, what sense does it have to say that a subject is “perverse?” Sergio Benvenuto, the author of several books and articles on this subject, proposes a description of perverse subjectivity as an exquisitely ethical puzzle. What we (analysts and psychiatrists) consider perverse today is in fact an act in which the subject takes enjoyment by using the subjectivity of the other or the Other.

SERGIO BENVENUTO is a psychoanalyst and a researcher in psychology and philosophy at the Italian National Research Council (CNR) in Rome, Italy. He graduated in Psychology at the University of Paris 7, and PhD with Jean Laplanche. He teaches psychoanalysis at the International Institute of the Psychology of Depth in Kiev. He is the founder and editor of the EJPsy. European Journal of Psychoanalysis . With A. Molino, he co-authored the book In Freud’s Tracks. Conversations from the Journal of European Psychoanalysis, Aronson, New York, 2008.