Perverse atmospheres

Further sketches

A while back, I wrote a short piece sketching out what I had learned from experience about the psychic fields that psychopathic people generate.

I have been thinking about overlaps and differences between psychopathic environments and narcissistic and perverse variants. The narcissistic type is harder to articulate because it overlaps so much with psychopathy. But the perverse is more distinct and I am ready to try my hand at detailing its unique atmosphere.

As with the post on psychopathy, I am merely trying to describe a psychological and social reality. I am not moralizing, even if one might draw out moral or ethical implications from my thoughts. I believe we all have psychopathic and perverse elements to our psyches — which is why these atmospheres are powerful to so many.

1. In a perverse atmosphere, pleasure is happiness. This is a common message of social media personalities, and why so much online content boils down to “I just had sex” or “I just ate food” — the implication is that this physical experience provided a long-lasting satisfaction, sans ambivalence. There is no psychic weight to the sex; there is no psychic (or literal!) weight to the eating.

2. Related: there are no aftermaths where pleasure is concerned. Pleasure is eternal, or at least in some fundamental way it exists outside of time. It has no consequence: you never get bored of physical pleasure, you never get full or sick from eating. The realities of time are foreclosed in a perverse atmosphere.

3. Because a perverse atmosphere relies on the power of transgression — and transgression is quickly normalized — a fantasy that one can always get or do “more” is essential. Sex must increase in frequency, volume, and type. Food adventures have a similar structure, familiar to anyone who has seen an influencer order 12 dishes at a restaurant. In a perverse atmosphere, transgression moves in an escalating way which always intensifies satisfaction.

   

   Mads Mikkelsen as Hannibal Lecter in Hannibal

4. But there is more to perversity than a focus on pleasure and transgression. Given that perversity relies so much on the build-up and release of tension to (theoretically) enable pleasure, it is notably concerned with limiting psychic tension. In a perverse atmosphere, certainties are the immediate and natural conclusion of thinking. If you bring an ethical dilemma to a pervert, they have a ready-to-go logic meant to foreclose any new thinking — nothing needs to be worked over emotionally or intellectually, the answer is obvious. Examples of a pervert’s advice: “You can’t control the other person’s reaction.” “That’s just how life works.” “Do what’s right for you.” “Embrace your nature.” Non-perverse people with dilemmas feel the tensions of conflict, uncertainty, ambivalence; the pervert rejects these states for modes of thinking that eliminate tension. In a perverse atmosphere, tension must only exist as a prop to enable catharsis, and if physical release is not possible, the tension must be eliminated by ideology immediately.

5. If you press a pervert to engage in thinking about a complicated situation, they will reject the normal structure of thinking-through, and redirect to a rationalizing idea that you are just afraid — of pleasure, of punishment, of asserting yourself. The deep logic of the pervert is that pleasure is available to us at all times, and it is society or our superego that stops us from embracing and experiencing it. In a perverse atmosphere, ethical concerns are merely copes for fears of pleasure or punishment.