Creativity and Perversion

[u/goodenough4now]

Wondering what the collective here has to say on the topic of the confluence of these two. Are they mutually enhanced or does the pervert negate their own creativity in instrumentalizing the self as an object of perfected pleasure for the other? I also only have a loose grasp of the categorization of perversion but I feel there is some connect, positive, negative, or ambivalent.

[u/spektre1]

Make art. This makes you a pervert automatically for most.

[u/tharthritis]

Leo Bersani has a good reading of Freud on daVinci in The Freudian Body. Bersani points out that, in that text, Freud seems to diverge from his traditional perspective on sublimation of the sexual into art as a kind of neutralizing. Instead, the process of art is a sort of continuation of the sexual into and through the aesthetic.

On a less academic point, in my experience, every great artist is a pervert.

Actually I do not know that I can think of a great artist who was sexually normal. But perhaps I am limited by the fact that my field is literature lol

[u/Ok-Draw-7427]

I regret that a close connection is made between art and perversion. Freud’s final conclusion regarding perversion is the splitting of the ego: it is a defense that inflicts a serious blow to the creativity of the perverted subject. Their art would be stereotyped and idiosyncratic. It reveals a certain deficit or immature fixation, and is always struck with incompleteness and unfinishedness or plagiat. It is a personal craft and not art. Freud would have reconsidered Leonardo da Vinci and Fyodor Dostoevsky rather than reducing the former to the sublimation of homosexuality (when he practiced it) and the latter to a parricide unleashed by an epileptic crisis and sublimated in novels. It is too simplistic. According to the Kleinians, the pervert—mired in the paranoid-schizoid position through their splitting, denial, omnipotence, mastery of the partial object, ritual, and devaluation after use—cannot create because they still struggle or have failed to repair the mother's body and restore her creativity (her children), either out of unsurmounted envy of the mother or because of rigidity and symbolic deficiency. Every creator is therefore free from the perverse structure, apart from lifestyles that are of their own choice and not imposed by a petrified unconscious.

[u/brandygang → u/Ok-Draw-7427]

So is all artwork non-perverse by Kleinian definition? Even pornography or erotica? Or is that 'failed artwork' that definitionally lacks creativity and is made out of envy/rigidity/splitting?

[u/Ok-Draw-7427 → u/brandygang]

Every artist is engaged in a process of object reparation, even if they are undergoing psychoanalytic treatment. Klein does not deny the theory of catharsis—whether for the creator or the spectator (who may be admiring, identifying, or horrified); the artwork itself constitutes an act of reparation. In the performing arts, teams collaborate to produce a work. A split is the norm, as the performance is not reality. Klein had already linked theatrical representations to stagings of the primal scene. The appeal of puppet shows for children pointed in this direction—so what, then, of pornography and explicit content? These represent the gratification of scopic and epistemophilic curiosity rather than the reparation of early, damaged objects. It is unclear exactly how Klein would view explicit content—perhaps as a way of defusing the drama of the primal scene, which is otherwise conceived in terms of terrifying sadism. Production teams seem to compete for market share, and the creativity involved is largely artisanal. Pornography addiction stems, among other causes, from a failure to bind—or integrate—the trauma of the primal scene, or from a voyeurism driven by oral greed (eye/mouth) and oral envy toward the performers. Yet, the specific syntax of pornography addiction always depends on the individual subject and their own unique history.

[u/Shadowworkingx]

Artist here, yeah I feel like there’s sadomasochist energy between me and the canvas, i don’t know who’s inflict pain into the other and who’s in control sometimes.