The Language of Perversion and the Language of Love

From long before the Trojan War to the ethnic cleansings of our own century, people have often used their potential to treat other human beings as things. It is this treatment of another person as a thing rather than as a human being that the eminent psychoanalyst, Dr. Sheldon Bach, sees as a perversion of object relationships and that forms the background of this powerful book. Perversion is a lack of capacity for whole object love, and while this includes the sexual perversions it also includes certain character perversions, character disorders and psychotic conditions. In this brilliant exposition Dr. Bach shows how some of the paradoxes of self/other, subjectivity/objectivity, male/female and instinct/object are negotiated in both illness and health.