Feminine Diverse Masochism

A Case of Feminine Perverse Masochism in a Woman who went through Paternal Incest
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Introduction
Although feminine perversion has been rather unstudied by psychoanalysts, it highlights a specificity of perversion in the feminine (Schaeffer, 2003) whereas masculine perversion is undergoing many theorizations (Casseguet-Smirgel, 1984) that emphasizes the denial of castration (particularly the mother’s castration as it exists in fetishism) and the denial of sexual difference.
In this paper, we intend to analyze the psychic functioning of Mary, a woman who was sexually abused by her father, and the transfero-countertransferential movements within the clinical relationship (Price, 1994). Indeed, beyond a stringent understanding of psychic scars
and stigmata resulting from the trauma, the study grasps the transfero-countertransferential outcomes and the clinician’s resistances when he is confronted with subjects who take pleasure in their own suffering.
The metapsychogical concepts of trauma, masochism and perversion will support our case study and our understanding of the effects of paternal incest.

Mary
Mary (aged thirty-eight) wished to meet us because she knew that our academic researches deal with the traumatism of incest. We met only a few sessions, for she could not go into a long term work. Like many victims of incest, she never denounced her father’s doings, nor did she take advantage of psychotherapy.
As soon as her mother accidentally died when Mary was eight, her father ambiguously behaved and he eventually slept naked with her. As a ten-year-old girl, she adopted an active role, taking pleasure witnessing paternal masturbations and erections. She legitimates deviant sexual practices with the death of her mother: she was expressing compassion towards her father. As she grew older, she not only submitted herself to her father’s wish, but she also anticipated his fantasies by actively participating in his sexual practices (threesomes, zoophilia).
The young woman currently functions in a split way: she has admirable success in her professional life whereas, outside her professional framework, she seeks arousal in brief intercourses with men who disgust and mistreat her. The arousal can only be felt by inventing role-plays that include domination, abuse and rape.
Those scenarios reveal Mary’s obligation to avoid repeatedly the other in order to achieve an intellectual enjoyment through humiliation: “a real moral suicide” (de M’Uzan, p. 135), with no objectal satisfaction, that aims the end of any traumatic excitation.
Any time she meets a masculine other, Mary feels emptiness which is a consequence of a possible destruction of her thought (Dejours, 2003).
She feels that she can be brought to life only by the excitations such as the pain she experiences in the sexual act. She neglects sexual or love meeting in favour of the rawest sexual with no desire. The extreme enjoyment that Mary finds in some sexual practices shows a cloacal confusion. She relentlessly seduces and consumes men (it expresses her phallic competition). She only invests activity while men are limited to their penis. Causing the act or the violent contact with the other’s body (as hallucinations of embraces with her father) may be a struggle against her confusion and disorganization, and paradoxically, a conjuration against her emptiness that is therefore delayed by sexual arousal (and not by any eroticized pleasure that is unachievable by Mary). The way she convokes man in a sadistic role (of a fantasized rapist) matches with an economic need to restrict the arousal in order to secure her psychic survival. With forced contacts, Mary can experience emotions again, admittedly with pain, and protect herself from the risk of a psychic death. The seduction ordered by the other is unacceptable. Passivity is then transformed into activity, that is to say, into the compulsive search for painful and degrading situations. Her sexuality becomes
addictive.
What fixation to a parental object would hide her sex addiction?