Polymorphous Perversity

Yes, its a real thing.

‘The ability to find pleasure in any part of the body.’

clearly in need of chemical neutering….

According to Freud, a young child is, by nature, “polymorphously perverse” (Introductory Lecturs 15.209)….

which is to say…..

‘that, before education in the conventions of civilized society, a child will turn to various bodily parts for sexual gratification and will not obey the rules that adults determine……….’

So, a spontaneous and irrepressible delight in the world…..

no, don’t tell me..!.

can it be that bad…?

Some adults retain such polymorphous perversity, according to Freud.

thank fuck for that.

Only now, unfortunately, ensconsed formally into the annals of science and medicine, is the final betrayal of the child whose words, or cries, will now officially not be believed and moreover, whose claim of abuse will itself be considered a symptom of illness……

Because when Freud renounced his Trauma Theory, which said that kids are driven crazy by their parents….

parents didn’t like it.

And parents were society.

So he came to the opposite conclusion as quickly as was decent to do so, without an Edwardian eyebrow being lifted too high….

which they liked better.

namely, that children fuck themselves up.

oh yes, that’s what I meant…

I remember now…

And so for a hundred years or more there has been built into the law of the land, via expert witnesses in autopsy, medicine and psychology, who, true to their training, consider, as a default point of reference that a child making a complaint is both lying and disturbed.

Its not just that Freud regarded his patients in such a poor light…

He came just in time to mark the end of a long process of disenfranchisment of the child. The quality of relatedness that the divine feminine once brought to life is lost along with the Great Mother and increasingly the child is unheld and unsafe.

When my twelve and a half year old son was asked by a court official where he wanted to live and he said with his father, this was taken to mean the opposite of what was said because the child couldn’t possibly know his own mind….

and so he was taken away…

during which time he went from am A grade student to a failing student….

and had to harm himself to get the authorities to sit up and take notice.

Apparently, at this, our pinnacle of evolution, kids don’t know what they want, don’t speak the truth and haven’t got their own minds. They are considered to be so stupid that you can’t open a window in the classroom on a hot summer’s day, in case one of them absent mindedly falls out…

…or maybe a whole clutch of them would suddenly make a mad dash for the window, and launch themselves at it…

…spilling

and falling

like Lemmings onto the concrete playground below..

stupid children.

So stupid, bottle tops come with instructions, ‘Twist’! Salt comes with a serving suggestion, a packet of peanuts warns of the possibility that the packet may contain nuts and that Harry Potter broomstick in the toy shop bears the legend,..

..”does not actually fly”.

That’s not evolved. That’s a deeply regressed, collectively depressed state with all common sense and faith in the other wrung out of it.

And so Narcisissim and OCD are not just defences, but consequences…

because ‘polymorphous perversity,’ is actually required for artistic and creative expression. Its containing of the chaotic processes that creativity and artistic expression involve. If you can take equal pleasure in whatever the world/mother has to offer, then you mind it’s inclement weather a little less and can play with what’s at hand.

But if you don’t get comfy and taste everything, then that unlived life becomes cold and vengeful, like a spurned lover.

”Unlived life does not sit idly on the shelf, it will turn around and bite you.” M L von Franz.

And so if our kids aren’t given the basic credit of being able to top a strawberry without supervision then how are they to get comfy and experimental and curious about everything?

And if we then don’t live life out to the last drop, challenging all kinds of sacred cows in doing so en route, we actually invite not just boredom and apathy on ourselves but fully fledged neuroses.

Give me the polywossname any day.

 

 

Published by

andywhite

Psychotherapist/writer/artist/ author of, 'Going Mad to Stay Sane', a psychology of self-destructiveness, about to come into its third edition. Soon to be printed for the first time, 'Abundant Delicious.. the Secret and the Mystery', described by activist Satish Kumar as, ' A Tao of the Soul'. This book documents the archetypal country through which the process of individuation occurs and looks at the trials and tribulations we might expect on the way. In the meantime..... Narcissisim is the issue of our age. This blog looks at how it operates, how it can damage and how we may still fruit despite it.

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