During the Mazan rape trial, the main defendant, Dominique Pelicot, was presented by psychiatric experts as a man who suffered from various sexual perversions (today we prefer to talk about “paraphilia”). What does this term “perversion” encompass? How has the view of sexual perverts evolved since the Middle Ages? Do Dominique Pelicot’s co-defendants also suffer from sexual perversions or are they “ordinary men”, as we have often heard since the beginning of the trial?
We asked these questions to historian Elisabeth Roudinesco, author of a History of psychoanalysis in France in two volumes (Fayard, 1994; reissue of Points, 2023), from a Psychoanalysis Dictionary with Michel Plon (Fayard, 2023) and The dark part of ourselves. A story of perverts (Albin Michel, 2007). Member of the scientific committee of the magazine. History of psychiatryShe has chaired the International Society for the History of Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis since 2007. She is co-founder of the Institute of History and Enlightenment of Thought and contributor to “World of Books.”
As part of the investigation into the Mazan rapes, two expert psychiatrists from the court, Laurent Layet and Paul Bensussan, examined the main accused, Dominique Pelicot. The first concludes that he presents a “paraphilic deviation,” the second that he is affected by “several paraphilias and extraordinary fantasies.” What does this word “paraphilia” refer to?
It is a technical word, even jargon, that designates, in the sense Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), all sexual perversions. Born in 1952, published by the American Psychiatric Association, this international classification of human behavioral disorders has become the dominant tool of contemporary biological psychiatry: psychiatrists around the world report their work through its nomenclatures.
The word “paraphilia”, which appears in DSM in 1980, designates, in its latest version (2013), “imaginative fantasies (fantasies) that sexually arouse, sexual impulses or behaviors that occur repeatedly and intensely and that involve inanimate objects, suffering or self-humiliation of one’s partner, of children or other people. -consenting persons, and extending over a period of at least six months” – exhibitionism, fetishism, frotteurism, pedophilia, sexual masochism, sexual sadism, voyeurism, transvestism or fetishism…
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