Scott Alexander (reading by Solenoid Entity / Astral Codex Ten podcast host)

More interested in some other perversion?

Fink has an explanation for that one too.

Other claims, quote, Lacan goes so far as to say that female masochism is a male fantasy and qualifies lesbianism not as a perversion but as heterosexuality because women are the other sex by some corollary of Lacan's definition of the other.

Homosexuality

In Fink's case study of a pervert, a certain male patient could only get sexually aroused when a woman was wearing buttons.

The more buttons, the more aroused.

His analyst discovered that he had a very weak, contemptible father, had continued to be mummy's little boy until well into primary school age, but one time heard his father refer to his mother's genitals as a button.

Also around that time he had appendicitis and got a surgery which ended with an image of his father holding a jar with his appendix in it.

This was close enough to castration that the patient was able to stitch together this image and the button memory into a workable paternal function.

needing some kind of Oedipal resolution to become a coherent subject.

He willed himself to pretend that the appendix was a penis, that his father was threatening to castrate him, and then, I can't believe I'm writing this sentence, used the word button as a substitute for the moral law.

In the end, he successfully avoided psychosis and suffered nothing worse than a lifelong button fetish.

Neurosis is the result of a totally normal paternal function.

It's not meant to be a stigmatising or disease-related term.

Anyone who isn't psychotic or perverted is neurotic by definition.

People who are conventionally neurotic in quotes are the extreme of this type, or the people of this type who are handling it poorly.

People who are really well-adjusted and have no mental health problems are still neurotic in the Lacanian sense.

just less so slash better at navigating it.

Neurotics believe in the other and care a lot what it thinks of them, but they never really know what the other wants, which is terrifying.

They're probably bad at sex, since the paternal function causes them to unconsciously fear sexual pleasure, and since sex involves contact with the other, which is terrifying, the subspecies of neurosis are