The absent father: his role in sexual deviations and in transference

In this paper, sexual perversion is discussed and connected with the absence of the father and with the failure of a primary relationship with a mother who is incapable of leading the child to the threshold of Oedipus. Sexual perversion may be considered as the expression of a narcissistic personality organisation which makes massive use of splitting and projective identification as a defence against separation anxiety. This prevents homosexual perverts from dis-identifying from their mothers and from attaining a distinct gender identity. The clinical case of a homosexual male patient is presented, where the absence of the father underlay his resentment, conveyed in the transference by means of lamentations and boredom, with which the patient sadistically tormented the analyst, thus giving vent to his deep resentment over an absent and unreliable father and over a mother from whom he could only be separated at the cost of persecutory anxiety and feelings of jealousy.