This article, published in Portuguese for the first time, is the result of a seminar given by the author in 1966, which later became a classic in French psychoanalysis since its first publication in 1967. It examines perversion as a clinical structure. Refusal, Law and Challenge are the three central aspects that the author discusses regarding the response that the perverse person forges in the face of what Freud termed “horror.” He is referring to horror that arises when the perverse person is confronted with the reality of the difference between the sexes. To his or her fascinated gaze, this difference is seen as a confirmation of being condemned to lose the object of desire (the mother) and the instrument of pleasure (the penis), instead of having become capable of recognizing the law, which is the only thing that could have guaranteed the person’s status as desiring subject.
Psychoanalysis; perversion; desire; pleasure