Clinical and Theoretical Aspects of Perversion: The Illlusory Bond

'Perversion is a challenge for theory and psychoanalytic practice that Juan Pablo Jimenez and Rodolfo Moguillansky, American psychoanalysts known for the originality of their contributions, have managed successfully. In this book they offer us vivid and detailed clinical material of patients of analysis who presented various kinds of perversions, which they accompany by a comprehensive and accurate review of major psychoanalytic contributions on the subject, and their own contributions to it.

'The reader will find not only scholarship, but also he will find himself trapped in a thriller where the analyst is continually asked to leave his role as analyst to enter a game that fascinates and rejects. In a masterful way the authors describe their own internal vicissitudes in the treatment of these patients, the counter-transferential difficulties and how perversion becomes a source of inevitable collusions in the mind of the analyst. They take us to face, from an intersubjective perspective, dilemmas of interpretation, and to become aware of the situations in which the classic transferential interpretation, when it is not attuned to the psychic reality of the patient can retraumatize him and generate adverse events.

'We also count, as in thrillers, on researchers who help us review the facts and the storyline. The chapters of the book are accompanied by discussions with relevant well-known figures of psychoanalysis, as P. Fonagy, C. Featherson, and R. Krause. The end result enriches the reader with this exchange of opinions, that is in agreement with the poliphonic character of current pluralistic psychoanalysis.'

- Ricardo Bernardi, IJP Latin American Editor; IPA International Research Board Vice Chair

Contributors: Carlos R. Featherston, Peter Fonagy, Juan Pablo Jiménez, Rainer Krause, Rodolfo Moguillansky, Heitor Gunther Perdigao