Robert M. Young Online Writings
'Is "Perversion" Obsolete' 83k
I had been giving seminars on various aspects of sexuality when an early version was presented on the Royal Post-Graduate Medical Society course on 'Problems in Psychosexual Medicine' in September 1993. The next year I was invited to give a series of lectures at the University of Manitoba as a 'Distinguished Person'. I chose to reflect further on the ever-widening sense of publicly-acknowledged deviations from the norms of sexuality which prevailed when I was a young man and to juxtapose these with orthodox Freudian theory and Kleinian ideas. I gave the talk at Psychiatry Grand Rounds at the University of Manitoba School of Medicine, and there was no reponse at all. Revised versions were presented to the Sheffield Centre for Psychotherapeutic Studies and to the Lincoln Centre in London. A version was published in Psychology in Society No. 21:5-26, 1996.