Polymorphous perverse
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Polymorphous perverse is a psychoanalytic term for human ability to gain sexual gratification outside socially normative sexual behaviors. Sigmund Freud used this term, not pejoratively, to describe the normal sexual disposition of humans from infancy to about age five.
[edit] Freud’s theory
Freud theorized that humans are born with unfocused sexual libidinal drives, deriving sexual pleasure from any part of the body. The objects and modes of sexual satisfaction are multifarious, directed at every object that might provide pleasure. Polymorphous perverse sexuality continues from infancy through about age five, progressing through three distinct developmental stages: Oral, Anal, and Phallic. Only in subsequent developmental stages do children learn to constrain sexual drives to socially accepted norms, culminating in adult heterosexual behavior focused on the genitals and reproduction.
Freud taught that during this stage of undifferentiated impulse for sexual pleasure, incestuous and bisexual urges are normal. Lacking knowledge that certain drives are forbidden, the polymorphously perverse child seeks sexual gratification wherever it occurs. In the earliest phase, the Oral phase, the child forms a libidinal bond with the mother via sexual pleasure gained from sucking the breast.
For Freud, perversion is a non-judgmental term. He used it to designate behavior outside socially acceptable norms.
[edit] Political jargon
Some leftist social critics champion polymorphous perversion. Psychologists and philosophers influenced by Marxism and deconstruction analyze the repression of polymorphous desire as a means of economic social control, and postulate the libratory efficacy of practicing adult polymorphous perversion. Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender theorists and rights advocates have reclaimed the term without stigma, arguing gender as social construct.
Conservative Christian writings use the term pejoratively, contending that increasing social acceptance of polymorphous perversions, including homosexuality, weakens Western society by eroding its underlying Judeo-Christian foundations. They sometimes cite a Culture or Age of Polymorphous Perversity as an organized attack against the nuclear-family social unit.
