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International Forum of Psychoanalysis

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On perverse thinking
a
Michael Ermann
a
Deutsche Psychoanalytische Gesellschaft , Munich, Germany
Published online: 19 Aug 2006.

To cite this article: Michael Ermann (2005) On perverse thinking, International Forum of Psychoanalysis, 14:3-4, 188-192,
DOI: 10.1080/08037060510044714

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ORIGINAL ARTICLE

On perverse thinking
A case vignette

MICHAEL ERMANN
Downloaded by [Australian National University] at 05:39 30 December 2014

Deutsche Psychoanalytische Gesellschaft, Munich, Germany

Abstract
Perverse thinking is found not only in perversion, but also in other psychic structures. It is bound neither to aggressive nor to
sexual experience. It is a state of mental functioning outside reality and fantasy, and occurs whenever an individual gets into
an existential irritation, which demands a fundamental change. It creates denial as a protection against destruction that does
not really change reality, but creates another reality besides the objective one. It is thinking in terms of two incompatible
realities and the replacement of the knowledge of its incompatibility by the idea of its being normal: the acceptance of the
coexistence of two states of thinking that are excluding one another is the perversion of normality. By the use of some case
material, this paper demonstrates how this mode of functioning can intrude into transference-countertransference
dynamics, and how one can try to handle it.

Key words: incompatible realities, perverse thinking, perversion of normality

Theoretical background do not necessarily and constantly dominate the

Since the beginning, psychoanalysts have discussed
perversion as a topic of special interest from different
points of view: in regard to underlying libidinal
fixations, relating to its defensive and protective
function, as a mode of object relatedness, as a split
of the self, or as an avoidance of intimacy and denial
of reality. Or to put it into the Lacanian perspective,
as a structure and organization.
As I am dealing with not a structural, but with a
functional approach in this paper, I do not want to
characterize the perverse person; instead, I want to
draw attention to perverse thinking, which may be
found not only in perversion, but also in other
psychic structures
/ neurosis, borderline, psychoso-
matics, psychosis, and even in health. It may coexist
with other functional principles in one and the same
person and occur to various degrees even in one
single episode, for example in one analytic session.
This approach focuses on perverse elements in
psychic functioning and relatedness. When they
occur, they have their own result
/ in comparison
with neurotic or psychotic mechanisms
/ but they
whole personality. By this approach, I feel in line
with the mainstream of European thinkers like Freud
himself, Khan, Morgenthaler, McDougall, Bollas
and Betty Joseph, and I refer especially to John
Steiner (1) who, by his concept of ‘‘psychic retreat,’’
gave me a particular understanding of perverse
thinking.
Perverse thinking is bound to neither aggressive
nor sexual experience. It is a functional mental state
outside reality and fantasy. It occurs whenever an
individual gets into an existential irritation, which
demands a fundamental change. Freud (2) has
claimed that the observation by the male child of
the absence of a penis in the female is such an
irritation. Klein (3) and her scholars assume that
being threatened by paranoid anxieties and the
discovery of reality outside the self has the quality
of a catastrophic change in the mind of the subject.
Money-Kyrle (4) regarded three ‘‘primary facts of
life’’ that seem to be particularly difficult to accept.
They consist
/ in my words
/ of the perception of
being separated and depending, of being excluded
and vulnerable, and of the experience of limitation.

Correspondence: Professor Michael Ermann, Abteilung für Psychotherapie und Psychosomatik, Psychiatrische Klinik, Ludwig-Maxim-Universität,
Nussbaumstrasse 7, DE-80336 München, Germany. E-mail: michael.ermann@med.uni-muenchen.de

ISSN 0803-706X print/ISSN 1651-2324 online # 2005 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/08037060510044714

Recognizing those facts may cause such a basic
irritation in some individuals that they retreat behind
a powerful system of defences, which Steiner (1)
calls a ‘‘hiding place’’ or a ‘‘psychic retreat’’.
Perverse thinking is such a psychic retreat. Con-
verting from passively being threatened into actively
making fantasies, perverse thinking creates denial as
a protection against destruction. Thus, the condition
of perverse thinking is a fundamental irritation, and
its product is denial.
In contrast to neurotic denial, denial in perverse
thinking is a specific one. It does not really change
reality, but it creates another reality besides the
objective one. It is similar to that in the episode in
which Freud told about a boy who was waiting for
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his dead father: ‘‘I know that he is dead,’’ he said,
‘‘but I do not understand why he does not come for
dinner.’’
So we can say that perverse thinking is thinking in
terms of two incompatible realities: dependency and
autonomy, attachment and omnipotence, bound-
aries and eternity. It is, however, less about the fact
that two realities coexist, which is peculiar in the
perverse state, than about the replacement of the
knowledge of their incompatibility by the idea of its
being normal. The misrepresentation of the ‘‘objec-
tively ab-normal’’ into ‘‘subjectively normal’’ is the
perverse principle; in other words, the acceptance of
the coexistence of two states of thinking that exclude
one another is the perversion of normality. Accord-
ing to Money-Kyrle (4), we can call its rationaliza-
tion by an unconscious thought the ‘‘perverse
argument’’.
So far, we can say that perverse thinking is a mode
of functioning in order to cope with existential
irritation. It works by splitting the knowledge of
reality (normality) and denial of the incompatibility
of coexisting alternative modes of thinking. The
resulting mental state of course weakens the sense
of reality as well as interpersonal relationships. I
want to demonstrate how it can intrude into
transference-countertransference dynamics, and
how I tried to handle it, by presenting some case
material.
A case vignette
My patient is a married man in his mid-thirties who
came to analysis because he felt depressed and
incapable of resolving his problems of being with
two women
/ his wife and his mistress. Very soon, it
became obvious that one part of him wanted to be an
ideal husband and father to his two little girls. He
wanted to be different from his own father, who,
according to him, had shown no deep interest in him
and no strong attachment to his family. But another
On perverse thinking 189
part of my patient felt devoured by his wife and
children and longed for sexual excitement with his
mistress, with whom he felt young and attractive.
When he stayed with his family, he felt absent and
longed for his mistress. When he was with her, he felt
uninterested in her and full of guilt feelings towards
his wife and his children. At home, he felt sucked out
and without energy; with his mistress, he was tense
and impotent. He said, ‘‘It is as if I am not living my
own life.’’
In the course of the analysis, we worked a lot on
his relational conflicts and on their background in his
biography. The crucial point was that his mother had
used him as a compensation for her unsatisfied
desires in her relationship with his father. As her
self-object, he never had gained a secure sense of
self, and he did not feel congruent unless he was in
agreement with her. He had the unconscious knowl-
edge that he had displaced his father, and he was
convinced that his father hated him for that.
We thus found out that, by the coexistence of the
two relationships
/ with his family and with his
mistress
/ he maintained a potential retreat from
being totally involved in the relationship with his
mother, and that living in two partial relationships
saved him from the total loss of his self.
Although we succeeded in the construction of his
unconscious conflicts and fantasies, this man was
unable to overcome his problems of choosing
between his family and his mistress. More and
more, I felt that he had arranged his life in two
contradictory realities
/ the one inside and the one
outside his analysis with me. Finally, I was convinced
that the incongruity between his social life and the
insights that he got in his analysis felt normal to him.
So I felt that we had got into a perverse situation,
and his analysis into stagnation. I experienced him as
more and more superficial, out of contact with me,
and I had doubts about his motivation. I myself felt
irritable, not concentrating, provoking and some-
times even ironic when he came ‘‘with always the
same problems’’ to the sessions.
Only when I realised that we had entered into a
perverse relationship did I find my way back to my
psychoanalytic position, and I was thus able to think
about what was going on between us and to
communicate what I had understood. Once, when
he came again in despair, I said to him, ‘‘You are
looking for a resolution in order to find yourself. But
you are afraid of a catastrophe if you change your
life. Maybe you cannot imagine but one way out
/
and that is: life in two worlds.’’ I then went on to
explain to him
/ not for the first time
/ how I
understood his need for the coexistence of parallel
relationships: the coexistence of his family life and
his love affair in his social life, as well as the
 190 M. Ermann
coexistence of his life inside and outside his analysis
with me.
After this intervention, which I thought was close
to what he was feeling, he surprised me by falling
into a long and hostile silence. I wondered what had
happened, and he said, in an ice-cold voice, ‘‘I don’t
want you to understand me. I was always convinced
that you don’t intend to get me out of that situation.’’
He came into the next session with a devaluating
attitude and did not talk. After a while, I asked him
whether it was because of the previous session. He
did not answer but, after a while, he told me a
dream:
I had a dream that I came to my session, but your
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room was crowded with students sitting even on
my couch. There was real chaos. At last, I found
you sitting at your desk deeply engaged in a
conversation with a handsome female student. I
felt that you were very familiar with her.
In the course of this session, I made some inter-
pretations of his dream in reference to the irritation
that my interpretation during the previous session
might have provoked in him. I told him that
obviously he tried to keep feelings hidden from me
and that he was perhaps irritated because I had
gained some insight into his internal state of coex-
isting realities. I commented that he might be afraid
of the consequences for our relationship if I got such
insights into his inner life and feelings. ‘‘But perhaps
even more than that,’’ I told him, ‘‘you are irritated
because you are unconsciously convinced that I am
not really interested in and engaged with you. And
realising my understanding, you cannot maintain
that conviction.’’
Later in that session, I continued, ‘‘I am sure that
besides the part of you that is hiding, there is also
another part which is convinced that I am occupied
with you very deeply
/ as with the student at the
desk of my office.’’ Then he said: ‘‘When I come to
see you, I always feel that you are against me
/
though very deep in my mind I know that you are
honestly in favour with me.’’ And I answered, ‘‘In a
certain way, you are talking about yourself; you feel
you are against me and
/ at the same time
/ in
favour with me. And you cannot resolve that contra-
diction. But probably, love has not yet started to
fight against hostility within you.’’
Commentary
What was perverse in this episode? I feel that it
demonstrates how the perverse principle of the
acceptance of coexisting incompatible realities had
intruded into diverse dimensions of this man’s
thinking and experience, and of our relationship:

/ On the level of his social reality, his neurotic
conflict was in a certain way neutralized by the
perpetuation of the coexistence of two relation-
ships. He was thus protecting himself against an
involvement in one exclusive relationship about
which he had the fantasy that it would destroy
his self. One can formulate the unconscious
thought behind that by the argument ‘‘I do not
harm anyone who does not know about it.’’

/ On the level of the working alliance, he created
a coexistence between social reality and the
analytic dialogue. He came to analysis, but he
did not draw any conclusions from it. On this
level, his perverse thought was the unconscious
argument: ‘‘Why the hell should talking help at
all . . . ?’’

/ Finally, on the level of transferential dynamics,
he was dominated by the two contradictory
modes of object relatedness: a good and satisfy-
ing object relationship, and a disappointing and
hostile one. That mental state was rationalized
by an unconscious thought such as ‘‘It is
sufficient that I know that there is a contra-
diction . . . .’’
As perverse elements are intruding into the mind of
the analyst, they cause a shared regression of
thinking and of the relationship. The analytic dialo-
gue thus becomes as unfruitful as perversion itself; it
turns into a circle of ‘‘always the same’’ without
consequences. If this happens, analysis as an en-
counter serves as a place of psychic retreat, and the
analytic process loses contact with reality. As a
consequence, the perverse excitement is acted out
by the obsessive repetition of ‘‘always the same
relationship’’ and ‘‘always the same state of mind’’.
In my case, I realised that I had been included into
that state of mind when I recognized that I had lost
contact with my patient and with myself. He was
visible to me, but I could not get into touch with
him. That was another manifestation of the perverse
principle, which was unconsciously implying the
perverse illusion: ‘‘As I come to analysis, I am in
analysis.’’
That kind of thinking corresponded to a specific
countertransference: I was feeling myself, but I was
unable to think as an analyst about what I was
feeling. I became angry, bored or even ironic, but
was unable to recognize the underlying interaction.
We had thus both entered into a state of mind that
was dominated by perverse elements within the
transference relationship.

This collusion became obvious to me when he
spelled out: ‘‘I do not want you to understand me’’. I
then realised that the helping alliance between us
had been perverted into a hostile relationship
/ and
that he was neither worried about that nor consider-
ing whether he should stop analysis. In some way, I
myself had negative feelings about our encounter,
but those feelings seemed to remain without con-
sequences as well.
Once I had perceived that we were communicating
on an ‘‘as-if level’’, and that we were no longer
dealing one with one another like real persons in
analysis, I found my way back to my analytic
position; for example, I stepped back from our
perverse interaction and became able to show him
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what had happened and why. I was able to make my
interpretations and show him that his withdrawal
was caused by his fear, which had been provoked by
my insights and understanding. Needless to say, it is
of course not a single intervention of this kind that
changes the situation, but only a repeated perception
of and confrontation with perverse manifestations
and the continuous interpretation and working
through of their function.
Closing remarks
As a conclusion, one can say that perverse thinking is
a state of mental functioning in which thoughts serve
the purpose not of communication, but of psychic
retreat. That state was formerly described in terms of
the negative therapeutic reaction (5
/7) and destruc-
tive narcissism (8
/10). It is the restriction of contact
with reality on the basis of miscommunication,
which is marked by sublime aggression, suppressed
excitement and repetition of ‘‘always the same’’. To
get out of that miscommunication, it is crucial that
On perverse thinking 191
the analyst withstands the pressure that derives from
it. This may help the patient to gain insight into the
‘‘ab-normality’’ of his perverse thinking and to
reflect on it.
Finally, when we raise the question of the origins
of perverse thinking, we can assume that it is based
on experiences of being misinterpreted with regard
to feelings and desires during early interaction. I
believe that such experiences form misrepresenta-
tions of the inner world and an insecure under-
standing of and working through the other. If this
speculation is true, we can regard perverse thinking
as a special way of misunderstanding life on the basis
of existentially being misunderstood.
References
1. Steiner J. Psychic retreats. Pathological organisations in
psychotic, neurotic and borderline patients. London: Routle-
dge; 1993.
2. Freud S. Fetishism (1927). London: Hogarth Press; 1981; SE
21. p. 149.
3. Klein M. Notes on some schizoid mechanisms. International
Journal of Psychoanalysis. 1946;27:99
/110.
/ /
4. Money-Kyrle R. Cognitive development. In: Meltzer D, et al,
editors. The collected papers of Roger Money-Kyrle. Strath
Tay, Perthshire: Clunie Press; 1968.
5. Freud S. The ego and the id (1923). London: Hogarth Press;
1981 SE 19. p. 3.
6. Freud S. Analysis terminable and unterminable (1937).
London: Hogarth Press; 1981 SE 23. p. 211.
7. Leupold Löwenthal H. Notes on Sigmund Freud’s ‘‘Analysis
terminable and unterminable’’. International Journal of Psy-
choanalysis. 1988;69:261
/72.
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8. Rosenfeld H. On the psychopathology of narcissism. Interna-
tional Journal of Psychoanalysis. 1964;45:332
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9. Rosenfeld H. A clinical approach to the life and death instinct.
International Journal of Psychoanalysis. 1971;52:169
/78.
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10. Kernberg O. Severe personality disorders. New Haven: Yale
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 192 M. Ermann
Summaries in German and Spanish
Ermann M. Über perverses Denken. Eine Fallvignette.
Perverses Denken tritt nicht nur in der klinisch manifesten
Perversion auf, sondern kann auch bei anderen psy-
chischen Organisationen in Erscheinung treten. Es ist
weder an aggressive noch an sexuelle Akte gebunden.
Perverses Denken ist ein Funktionszustand, der außerhalb
der Realität und der Phantasiewelt liegt und auftritt, wenn
grundlegende Veränderungen bevorstehen. Es schafft eine
Verleugnung als Schutz gegen Destruktion, verändert aber
nicht wirklich die Realität, sondern schafft eine zweite
Wirklichkeit neben der objektiven. Es besteht darin, dass
die Betroffenen gleichzeitig in zwei unvereinbaren Reali-
täten denken und die Unvereinbarkeit verleugnet wird.
Das Nebeneinander wird zur Normalität erklärt. Diese Art
des Denkens, ihr Einfluss auf die analytische Beziehung
und eine Möglichkeit, damit umzugehen, werden in
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diesem Beitrag dargestellt.
Ermann M. Acerca del pensar perverso. Una viñeta
clı́nica.
El pensamiento perverso, no se encuentra solamente en la
perversión, sino también en otras estructuras psı́quicas.
No está asociado a las experiencias sexuales o de agresión.
Se trata de un funcionamiento mental fuera de la realidad
y de la fantası́a, y ocurre cuando un individuo tiene una
irritación existencial, que demanda un cambio fundamen-
tal. Crea una negación como una protección contra la
destrucción que no cambia la realidad necesariamente,
pero produce otra realidad a lado de la realidad objetiva.
Es pensar en términos de dos realidades incompatibles y la
idea de ese pensamiento como si fuera normal, reemplaza
el conocimiento de esta incompatibilidad: Aceptar la
coexistencia de dos estados de pensamiento excluyentes
en sı́ mismos es la perversión de la normalidad. A través de
material de un caso el presente trabajo demuestra cómo
este modo de funcionamiento puede introducirse en la
dinámica de la transferencia-contratransferencia, y cómo
puede ser manejada.