On Kissing and Other Perversions

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Sigmund Freud has his critics. He always has. Chief among them are the religious, who find his works antagonistic; feminists, who accuse him of being dated and sexist; and contemporary psychologists, who find his theories groundless and perhaps a bit bizarre. Yet, from among these three groups also come some of his staunchest defenders. One Catholic priest, for instance, recently highlighted Freud’s great “compassion,” writing:

That an esteemed physician, a man of science living in Victorian Vienna, should sit with, listen to, and affirm the thoughts, feelings, and longings of women who had been written off as hysterics ought to be enough to problematize the charge of sexism. That he displayed just as much humanity with every patient, every fellow-sufferer he treated, makes him worthy of canonization. This compassion comes through in his writing. It does not matter whether he is examining the irrational, erratic tendencies of the psychologically unwell, the appalling proclivities of the extremely sexually deviant, or the crimes and abuses of society writ large, Freud always seeks to understand and rarely, if ever, condemns.

Even if we remain (rightfully) skeptical of such naked attempts at hagiography, we ought not to dismiss the genius of one of the 20th century’s most influential thinkers out of hand. A careful engagement with Freud will reveal that there is much we can learn from his writings, even—and perhaps especially—if we disagree with his conclusions.

One challenging aspect of Freud’s psychoanalytic theory is his insistence that human sexuality is fundamentally perverse—that there is nothing “normal” or “natural” about human desire. Making what would become his signature intellectual move, Freud begins his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality with a consideration of “sexual aberrations” to show that it is only by looking to the margins that one begins to reckon with just how abnormal the “normal” really is.

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Consider a deviation we would surely call perverse. Imagine a man who fetishizes his beloved’s saliva. Imagine that he finds it sexually satisfying to use her toothbrush. The image is enough to make one cringe. And, yet, as Freud points out, “The limits of such disgust are . . . often purely conventional: a man who will kiss a pretty girl’s lips passionately, may perhaps be disgusted at the idea of using her tooth-brush, though there are no grounds for supposing that his own oral cavity, for which he feels no disgust, is any cleaner than the girl’s.”

Kissing itself is worth pausing and meditating on. For, although we have attached thousands of years of poetic symbolism to the kiss and its meaning, if we consider such an embrace a bit more dispassionately, we will find it difficult to describe kissing as anything but unusual. Why do we find it gratifying to press our lips against the lips of our beloved? What makes it appealing to, as Freud writes, put our mouths on the entrance of someone else’s digestive tract? The answer points to the ways in which human sexuality is always bound up with other desires and drives—a key insight for Freud.

Building upon this, the philosopher Jean-Luc Beauchard argues that kissing “barely disguises the desire to devour the other.” (Think of the language we use with our children as we shower them with kisses: I’m going to eat you up!) Our amorous desires are often conflated with hunger, and there is no doubt that the two share a profound link.

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Whether we agree with Freud that our sexual urges arise in infancy and are thus are tied to the infantile pleasure of feeding—“No one who has seen a baby sinking back satiated from the breast and falling asleep with flushed cheeks and a blissful smile can escape the reflection that this picture persists as a prototype of the expression of sexual satisfaction in later life”—we cannot deny that for human beings erotic desire is always about more than sex. It carries with it urges and longings that have almost nothing to do with sexual gratification.

To say this is to acknowledge the perverse nature of human sexuality. That descriptor, perverse, is, of course, loaded, carrying with it all the abuse, ridicule, and shame with which it has been wielded for centuries. But just because a word has been ill-used does not mean we ought not to use it. Initially, perverse—Latin: perversum, “thoroughly turned”—meant to turn away or split off from one’s intended aim. For Freud, perversions are merely sexual activities that either extend the aim of sex beyond genital union or linger over some intermediary relation with one’s partner, which would typically be quickly traversed on the way to sexual union.

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Now, pause for a moment and consider your own amorous endeavors. How many of them might be classified under Freud’s notion of perversion? How many involve proclivities that exclude sexual union altogether, whether they be as banal as caressing, handholding, and kissing, or as deviant as the fetishes we typically associate with Freudian notions of sexual life?

To admit that our own sexual behaviors do not always result in the “normal” aim of union “in the act of copulation” is merely to acknowledge that “even in the most normal sexual process we may detect rudiments which, if they had developed, would have led to the deviations described as ‘perversions.’” Or, said a bit more colloquially, human sexuality always aims at something beyond sex itself.

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While Freud’s writings might appear provocative, such insights are not as outlandish as they seem. Mystics and religious devotees of various persuasions have long held that our erotic desires express a deeper, more fundamental longing—a desire for God; today’s feminists and gender theorists insist that there is no sexual normativity and that desire is fundamentally ambiguous, and psychologists cannot help but to observe the incredible variety with which the sexual impulse expresses itself.

Such thinkers might not call the transcendent nature of human sexuality "perverse," but, like Freud, they are attempting to articulate the mysterious nature of desire in the language available to them. For Freud, it is through sex that we transcend our finite nature and aspire toward the “Heavenly Powers” of Eros and Thanatos, life and death. And, while we might quibble with his formulations and the conclusions he draws from them, there is no denying that he speaks the truth whenever he situates our existence in the tension that arises from the conflict between those two.