The psychotic, neurotic and perverted relation to taboo and euphemistic language

 

I: WHAT ARE “TABOO” AND “ACTING”?

 

            In this article I refer by “taboo” as a topic or object of conversation that is avoided to be discussed directly, even in the cases where it is in everyone’s mind already.

            The process of avoiding a taboo topic is named “acting”. Acting shall be distinguished from deceitfulness. In deceitfulness, you either lie (lie = say something false) or omit the truth in order to actually deceive your partners of conversation, making a genuine attempt at making them believe you. In acting, you lie, omit the truth, use a euphemism, or some other form of strategy, knowing fully well that you have no effect upon your conversation partners’ beliefs or knowledge.

            I choose to call it “acting” because it is exactly what is going on when you have literal actors on stage. When you are at the theatre, watching the actors, they pretend to be someone they are not, the audience knows, the actors know that the audience knows, and yet they continue to pretend it is real for the sake of entertainment. By “acting”, in this article, I am not referring to literal theater however, I am referring to “the acting of everyday life”.

            “Acting” is, for instance, whatever happens when you are in a group of friends, everyone is thinking of the same dirty or embarrassing thing, everyone knows that everyone is thinking of it, and yet you all avoid saying it out loud because of the awkwardness it would cause. Despite the fact that saying it out loud would not give anyone any new information, everyone is still avoiding it, because then you would lose the freedom to pretend (act). The dirty thing that everyone is thinking about is what we call “taboo”.

            “Acting” is also what happens when we avoid the topic of sexuality, replacing it with a euphemism or avoiding it altogether. When we tell someone to come home for “Netflix & Chill” instead of “sex”, it is what we call acting, because they know it is not (just) Netflix, you know that they know, they know that you know that they know, and yet you still continue pretending/acting. Here, the taboo topic is sex.

            In fact, sexuality is one of the primary forms of taboo in society. This is why it always irks me when people complain that Sigmund Freud was obsessed with sex. I don’t think he was the psychologist who was obsessed with sex, I think he was the psychologist who was obsessed with taboo. He simply looked around him, in society, and he saw that what is most taboo, consistent across cultures and time, is sexuality. Other commonly taboo topics include anything that is disgusting to most (excrements, urine, etc.), criticizing leaders in an authoritarian regime, love, a person’s negative feelings towards a stranger or acquittance, and a few others. In some cases, “taboo” can extend to death, drug-use or religious topics.

 

II: WHO IS THE “BIG OTHER”?

 

            The “big Other” in Lacanian psychoanalysis is an archetype with many possible ways to be defined or described. Some have argued that the term is too vague, general or all-encompassing in Lacan’s writings. In this article I will define the big Other as “an invisible and inexistent omnipresent presence that interprets everything literally”. The big Other is everywhere, but a bit “dumb”. The big Other is not the letter of the law, but the literal interpretation of the law. Thus, when two “actors” are “acting”, we say that they are not deceiving each other, they are “deceiving the big Other”. If we say “Netflix & Chill” instead of “sex”, we would say that we are deceiving the big Other into believing it is just Netflix & Chill. When Russians right now have to say “special military operation” instead of “war”, we would say that they are not deceiving literal other people that it is not a war, since everyone there knows it’s a war, we say that they are deceiving the big Other into believing that it is not a war.

            The big Other does not exist. It is not a literal person, nor some idea of a divinity. It is a “nothingness”, but a specific kind of nothingness that is created by our human interactions. It is an imaginary and abstract construct that is anthropomorphized in this article in order to talk about it as if it was a person, when it is not.

 

III: THE THREE PERSONALITY STRUCTURES OF JACQUES LACAN

 

            Throughout his work, Jacques Lacan introduced three categories that he called “clinical structures”: the psychotic, the neurotic and the pervert. What he called “clinical structures” is extremely close to what psychology nowadays understands by “personality types”, but many Lacanians would disagree with this interpretation unfortunately. Despite the poor choice of words, there is nothing “clinical” about the clinical structures, in other words, there is nothing “pathological”, they are not “mental illnesses”, and everyone has a structure. Hence, I will start referring to them as “personality structures”, instead, since they are closer to what we understand in modern psychology by “personality”: what do you have in common with others and how do you differ from others? Humans will end up clustering around a few personality traits, and if we look at one of those clusters and all the humans inside it sharing certain things that only they have and that none of the other groups have, we will usually call them a “personality type”. Let’s stick, however, to the term “personality structure”, in order to distinguish one’s structure (psychotic, neurotic, perverted) from one’s type in some other typological system (MBTI, Socionics, Enneagram, whatever) in future articles.

            I must underline again that there is nothing pathological about your personality structure. What Lacan names “the psychotic structure” is different from what modern psychology understands by psychosis, since not all people with a psychotic structure are literally psychotic/schizophrenic. Some are perfectly “healthy”, with no hallucinations or heavy delusions. However, the psychotic structure is thought to be a predisposing risk-factor for developing an actual psychotic break (or schizophrenia). Similarly enough, the “perverted structure” is not what we usually understand by literal sexual “perversion”, even if the people under such a structure are, perhaps, more likely to have them.

            It must also be pointed out that there is no evidence to suggest that there are actually more than three structures that you could be. Maybe Lacan just observed the three most common ones, but there are more of them.

            The most common and accepted way to define the structures in Lacanian psychoanalysis is as three differing relationships to the big Other. Since we previously connected the concept of the big Other with the concept of acting and taboo, how about we extend this to saying that the structures also imply three differing relationships to acting? This is going to be my personal contribution to the theory. I think the three differing relationships to acting can be summarized as follows:

1.     The psychotic tries to deceive the big Other while also explaining to it in what way they are about to be deceived. The psychotic often “pretends” (acts), but does not pretend that they do not pretend.

2.     The neurotic tries to deceive the big Other without explicitly stating that they are deceiving the big Other. The neurotic not only “pretends” (acts), but also pretends that they do not pretend. On top of deceiving the big Other, they also try to make the big Other believe that they are not being deceived. In this regard, they are the most “realistic” or “in-character”.

3.     The perverted structure is sort of in-between, here. The pervert tries to deceive the big Other while explicitly stating to the big Other that they are deceived but without stating in what way. The pervert tells the big Other “you are being deceived”, and then follows by deceiving it, but then lets the big Other figure out for itself in what way it is being deceived, so to speak.

Since we are talking about acting, you can view the three structures by an actual analogy with theatre. The psychotic is like an actor going on stage, telling the public “I am about to play this character from this play” and only after proceeding by actually getting in character and playing that role. The neurotic jumps on stage directly in character, without saying anything before. The pervert comes on stage, tells the public “I am about to play a role”, doesn’t say what role they play, and then follows by getting in character and playing their role. Let’s now analyze each of the three structures in more depth.

 

IV: THE PSYCHOTIC’S RELATIONSHIP TO ACTING AND THE BIG OTHER

 

            The psychotically structured individual has a very “primitive” or “immature” version of a sense of self. We could still say that the psychotic has a sense of self, in the sense that they can and do feel a difference between “self” and “Other”, but they have not yet developed the capacity for truly understanding and feeling the idea of a “true sense of self, behind the appearance”. For the psychotic, the essence is in the appearance, without anything “beneath” it. This could also relate to their issues with object permanence.

            Thus, for a psychotic, it is enough for another person to pretend, without pretending that they do not pretend. For a psychotic individual, another person just needs to say something, without trying to make it seem as it “came from them”, so to speak. To understand what this has to do with acting and euphemistic language, consider the following scenario:

 

A psychotic man approaches a psychotic woman on the street. The psychotic man tells her “Do you want to fuck?”. The psychotic woman responds “Oh my God, you are such a jerk, you’re supposed to ask me for a movie!”. The psychotic man signs and immediately right after responds “Alright, do you want to come home to watch Netflix?”. The psychotic woman responds “Now we’re talking!”. They both go home and have sex.

 

            While it is technically an imaginary scenario I made up for the sake of example, considering the fact that throughout human history about 100 billion people have lived on this earth, I am pretty sure that this exact conversation probably happened already somewhere in the world.

            What is going on here? We see that for the psychotically structured individual, euphemisms work even after you explain them. You could explain the meaning of a euphemism, and a few seconds later use it as if nothing ever happened. Thus, what the psychotic and the pervert share in common is living in a “double-existence” – while the neurotics are busy taking their own role-playing to the extreme, the psychotic and the pervert constantly switch between making “in-character” and “out-of-character” comments.

            Here is the most exaggerated example of the psychotic’s relation to lying and “acting”: a psychotic may tell you “Make me this compliment”, you repeat after them word for word, and they are satisfied. What goes on here? With the psychotic, you can tell them that the compliment is a lie, and then say the compliment, and it might still work. This is related to what I said previously, the psychotic personality doesn’t have a well-developed conception of a “sense of self”, and thus, if they hear the compliment, it doesn’t matter if the other actually believes that what they say is true, or if they lied, for the psychotic it is one and the same, since what they want is to hear those words said to them. For the psychotic, authenticity is a lie anyway, there is no “true you” behind the mask, the so-called “fakeness” is the default mode of existence.

            Let’s take another example where the “taboo” topic is still sexuality. A parent catches their child masturbating, they make eye contact for two-three seconds without saying anything, and then they leave. What happens the following morning, depending on the parent’s personality structure?

            A psychotically structured parent might say something like this: “Let’s not talk about the fact that you masturbated last night, because it is awkward”. It’s important to note that not all people who are psychotic need to say that, but almost all of the people who would naturally say that are psychotically structured. In the most ironical way, through the apparent attempt at avoiding the topic, they just brought the topic up. In the other words, the psychotic parent told their kid “Let’s play a role from now on, pretending that nothing happened last night” while also saying what happened last night, in other words, while also specifying what role they will play.

            Let’s take an example where the taboo topic is not sexuality. Here is a classic Slavoj Zizek joke: “In the Soviet Union, a crowd is gathered to hear Stalin’s speech. One person in the crowd shouts “To hell with Stalin’s authoritarian regime, it is horrible and he is a criminal dictator!”. A second person in the crowd shouts to the first one “Are you crazy, do you want to be in prison forever? You’re not allowed to criticize the regime!”. The second person would ‘disappear’ faster than the first.”

            What I would add to this joke, that I’m not sure if Zizek already pointed out, is that the second person from the crowd is textbook psychotic. The second guy told the first “You are not allowed to say that out loud”, while also specifying what is not to be said out loud. In other words, the psychotic person essentially said „Let’s play-pretend” while also specifying in what way they have to play-pretend.

            The psychotic’s main defense mechanism is called foreclosure. In foreclosure, whenever a topic is too uncomfortable or intense to be accepted, its existence is negated. The brain of the psychotic will simply make them not believe that whatever is too uncomfortable to be true is true, or, in the best-case, make them accept its existence but convince them that if they just ignore the problem, it will go away. We see psychotic foreclosure more from the political right than from the left nowadays: the virus’ existence is too painful to accept, so I don’t believe it exists, the war’s existence is too painful to accept, so I don’t believe in it, if we stop talking about racism it will magically go away, etc.

            The illusion of the psychotic is that they can escape “the simulation”. The Matrix is such an example, a movie made out of a misunderstanding of Baudrillard’s book “Simulacra and Simulation”. It is in every way a psychotic movie. The lie of the Matrix movie is that you can wake up from the simulation in the first place. “The red pill” is what psychotics imagine their foreclosure actually does. One example of such “simulations” or “fake realities” is what Zizek calls ideology, which is like the water that surrounds the fish, hard to realize that you are immersed in it, and not hard, but impossible to escape. The psychotic is like a fish in water closing its eyes and thinking that they have escaped the water because they do not see it. It is the same reasoning they apply when they might say “I do not care about politics so it does not affect me”, it is a defense mechanism – the political landscape is so painful to accept that it is simply ignored. A more general formula of foreclosure is “I will ignore the problem until it goes away” or, in the worst case, deny that the problem even exists.

            It is exactly the same thing that happens in the psychotic’s “out of character” comments towards acting around the taboo topics. The “acting” is a form of play-pretend, in other words, like a simulation. The psychotic’s “out of character” comments are a form of foreclosure, thinking that they can temporarily “shut down” the simulation, and returning in it later. The psychotic is lying to themselves when they believe that the simulation (“acting”) can be “turned off” in the first place, even temporarily.

            The psychotic personality structure is a risk-factor for developing an actual psychotic break, and the reason as to why usually goes something like this: the psychotic forecloses an aspect of reality (“This thing that makes me uncomfortable does not even exist”), thus leaving a “hole” or “gap” in reality. When their foreclosure becomes so strong, that hole in reality has to be “filled in” by something, and it is often filled in by hallucinations and delusions, to replace whatever was initially foreclosed.

A cliché example would be a psychotic finding it too painful to accept that the death of a loved one is real, that instead they hallucinate that they are still alive. What is interesting to be observed is that whatever is foreclosed is a lack. Thus, stating that a lack is not real, you are negating the negation. In the last example, they say “it is not real that my wife is not real”. The absence of absence returns back as a presence (as hallucination), just like how in binary logic, the negation of negation is affirmation. In more general terms, whatever is foreclosed is a loss. Even in the cases where it seems like the psychotic forecloses a presence, “a something”, they are actually foreclosing the lack/loss caused by the existence of that something. For example, if the Coronavirus’ existence is foreclosed by the psychotic, it’s not the virus’ existence per se that was too painful to accept by the psychotic, but the loss generated by the existence of the virus (monetary loss, loss of happiness, etc.). The negation is negated, and it returns back as a presence, thus a delusion, now, filling in the gap caused by the foreclosure (in other words, the psychotic thinks “If the virus is not real, then how do you explain everything else that seems to be caused by a virus?” – and then a delusion comes to “fill in the gap in reality”, like a conspiracy theory).

According to Lacan’s theory, the primary thing that the psychotic forecloses is the name of the father, also known as the symbolic father. It is the set of social norms and laws that prohibit desire. The name of the father is “the law”, in the sense of a prohibition that says “you are not allowed to say all your filthy desires in society, you have to act civilized”. Thus, the name of the father is the law that says “You can’t directly talk about sex, you must pretend you are inviting them home for ‘a movie’.”, or Putin’s law in Russia that says “You can’t directly talk about war, you must use a euphemism like ‘special military operation’”. We can now better understand what Lacan means when he says that the psychotic forecloses this symbolic law, or what Bruce Fink means when he says that this makes the psychotic feel “outside the law”. When the psychotic makes an out of character comment where they explain what a euphemism means before they use it, they are temporarily considering themselves to be exempt from “the law” – “the law made a temporary exception for me right now because I am special”. This could also explain why one of the symptoms of schizophrenia is defying social norms. What is the schizophrenic’s often-used justification for defying them? “God made an exception for me because I am the chosen one”. Schizophrenics may often say something like “God (or some other important figure like the president) chose me personally as their messenger, and communicated to me through electromagnetic waves that laws do not apply to me” as well.

 

V: THE NEUROTIC’S RELATIONSHIP TO ACTING AND THE BIG OTHER

 

The neurotic has a strong sense of self. For the neurotic, the difference between the essence and appearance is made clear. In social interaction, this manifests as them making a sharp divide between the “true you” (essence) and the “fake you” (appearance). This is why for the neurotic, you must not only pretend, but also pretend that you do not pretend. Hence why for neurotics, euphemisms usually stop working after you explain what they mean. The neurotic gets 100% “in role” or “in character”. To use Jungian terminology, the neurotic fully embodies their persona.

Let us return to a few of the examples in the psychotic section to see how a neurotic would respond. If a neurotic has to tell you that you have to replace “sex” with “movies/Netflix”, it does not count for them. With the neurotic, you not only have to pretend (pretend that you are only watch a movie), but also pretend that you are not pretending – thus giving the illusion that “it comes from you”. If a neurotic wants to be talked in a certain way, they cannot tell you “repeat after me”, like the psychotic (ex: “make me this compliment word for word”), because then it becomes obvious that the other person does not believe in what they are saying. If you are a neurotic and you tell someone else what to tell you, it is more like you are talking through their body, the other person is not doing it “authentically”. A neurotic only accepts compliments or euphemisms where the other person made an effort to make it seem like they came up with the idea themselves first.

For a neurotic, the big Other must know nothing. Everything taboo and related to taboo must be hidden from the big Other, thus really getting “in character” (in the persona). Returning to the example of the parent catching the child masturbating, what could a neurotic parent do the following morning? One possible neurotic response is to pretend that nothing ever happened and to act completely “normal”.

Now imagine that the following morning, the parent and the kid have a guest in their house, and at certain points, the guest is eavesdropping on them. If the parent is psychotic (telling their kid “let’s not talk about the fact that I caught you masturbating last night from now on”), the guest will learn what happened last night. If the parent is neurotic, the guest will not find out anything, since they will behave “normally”. You can think of “this third presence always eavesdropping us, but out of context” as the big Other. The psychotic tells the big Other what role they are playing, the neurotic refuses to even acknowledge that they are playing a role (you could say that a neurotic becomes one with their persona).

In the example of the Zizek’s joke about Stalinism and authoritarian regimes, the neurotic is often the one who acts completely “normal” as well, not criticizing the government, but also not saying out loud that you can’t criticize the government (in other words, pretending like nothing out of the ordinary is going on).

We can see what Lacanians mean when they say that the neurotic structure is the most “normal” one out of all three – not only in the sense that they are thought to be the most common one, but also displayed in their exact behavior as well. Even if, hypothetically speaking, they were the least common structure, they would still be the most “normal behaving”, so to speak. In public or certain formal social situations, everyone wears a “public mask”, a persona, hiding their true unacceptable (“taboo”) desires and thoughts, and the neurotic is the one that takes this role the most seriously, never getting out of it through “out-of-character comments”, and thus, acting the most ‘normal’.

The neurotic’s defense mechanism is called repression. In repression, something that is personally repulsive, socially unacceptable or somehow unpleasant is replaced with a metaphorical substitute. Thus, the very idea of euphemisms is a neurotic construct and an example of repression. Other “classic” examples of repression in psychoanalytic literature include (psychosomatic or psychological) symptoms as a metaphorical/symbolic expression of a psychic conflict.

The neurotic’s relationship to the name of the father (name of the father = “the social norms prohibiting the public expression of what is taboo”) is one of ambivalence. On one hand, they are uncomfortable or even afraid of engaging with what is taboo, so they need a name of the father prohibiting them. On the other hand, their persona is taken as a temporary “real identity”, so they do not want to lose their agency and “freedom”, they want to make it seem as they chose to respect those laws not because they are laws, but because of their own “free will”. Thus, various compromise formations arise in the neurotic personality in order to make them obey the name of the father while also giving themselves the illusion that they are doing it out of their own free will.

One such example is the neurotic stating that they hate submitting themselves to social norms, but “accidentally” (unconsciously) ending up in a situation where submitting yourself to them has a secondary benefit. The neurotic will lie to themselves that they are actually doing it for the secondary benefit, not for the social norm itself. In fact, they are doing it for the social norm itself, but they do not want to admit their own masochistic nature to themselves, so the secondary benefit was created in order to give the neurotic an excuse to follow the social norm. For example: “I do not like going to work, but I have to do it for the salary”. This could, in some cases, be a form of neurotic repression: the neurotic doesn’t want to admit to themselves that they enjoy being prohibited and forced into doing something, so they lie to themselves that it’s not the work that they like, but the salary.

Here is another example of a neurotic phrase: “If we didn’t follow social norms, everything would be chaos!”. The neurotic, here, lies to themselves that it’s not the social norms that they enjoy, it’s the avoidance of chaos that they actually want, and the social norms are only a necessary means to an end that they have to endure in order to avoid chaos. In other words, when a neurotic wants something that is somehow personally repulsive or socially unacceptable, they will lie to themselves that it’s not an end in of itself, but a means to an end for something else. When a neurotic wants something that is personally repulsive, they will say that “Actually, I don’t want to do this, but I have to do this in order to get something else”.

We can clearly see from the previous three paragraphs that the neurotic’s relationship to the name of the father is also one of submission. The name of the father always feels “imposed from the outside” for a neurotic. The neurotic finds it too painful to accept the harsh reality that we are all masochists who like to restrict our desires for no reason, so they project this restrictive part of themselves on the outside world, thus “accidentally” (unconsciously) ending up in situations where they are prohibited by other people. The most cliché example is a person unconsciously picking an authoritarian and restrictive spouse that would prohibit them from engaging with what they fear doing, thus making the neurotic “get the best out of both worlds” (“It’s not that I fear going to dance lessons, I want to go to dance lessons, but my husband doesn’t let me!” – here the neurotic gets the best of both worlds, not only do they avoid their fear of dancing in public, but they also avoid admitting to themselves that they have this fear in the first place). We could say, with a little exaggeration, that the neurotic is "the obedient rebel" - the ultimate rebel against authority in discourse but ultimately doing as it says in behavior.

How is this relevant for our discussion about acting, taboo and euphemisms? Since the symbolic law of the name of the father always feels imposed on the outside, the neurotic ultimately feels powerless in front of it. A social situation in which a taboo topic comes into conversation is anxiety-provoking for the neurotic individual, since they are only thinking about the fact that they themselves will have to struggle to avoid it, not always realizing that others will have to avoid it too and that they can use this to their own advantage (like the pervert realizes, but more on that later). Thus, if a neurotic ends up in a situation where they have to talk about sex and sexuality, for example, it is usually viewed as a purely unpleasant situation, since the only thing on the neurotic’s mind is how to best “beat around the bush” and talk around the topic instead of about the topic (through euphemisms, indirect communication, “hints”, omitting the truth, etc.). Any direct mentioning of the taboo topic would make the neurotic ‘escape’ their public persona, which goes against their entire purpose (since the neurotic is defined by being one with their persona in public, never going ‘outside’ it). If the neurotic has built a persona/mask of “person who doesn’t know the conversation is about sex”, “person who doesn’t know the conversation is about war”, etc.; then frantic, desperate efforts would be made to continue pretending that they are in that role, and with each moment that the conversation gets “closer” to those topics, the neurotic feels more and more that their persona will break and they will lose their stable sense of self, causing anxiety.

The neurotic’s ultimate anxiety or “nightmare scenario” is “What if everyone else around me is psychotic and I’m the only neurotic?”. Now, obviously, most people, including neurotics, do not know about psychoanalysis or what a psychotic or a neurotic are, but they still have an internal concept of “person who is not uncomfortable when talking about taboo topics”. So, for instance, the ultimate nightmare scenario that a neurotic might fear is “What if the topic of sex comes up and I’m the only person in the room who is too shy and awkward to talk about it and everyone else talks about it directly and freely?”.

Or, let’s take a scenario in which “the taboo” is not sexuality: in the workplace, the boss has an illegal deal with one of the coworkers which falls under what we’d call “corruption”. The topic becomes taboo: everyone knows about the deal, the boss knows everyone knows, everyone knows that the boss knows that everyone knows, and yet no one talks about it out loud, everyone beats around the bush when the topic comes up. The neurotic’s ultimate anxiety is: “What if I will not manage to avoid the topic enough, what if everyone around me is more comfortable talking about it than I am, what if I will be cornered into a situation in which I can’t do anything but say out loud what everyone else is thinking?”. The neurotic is only preoccupied with what other frantic effort they can make to avoid the topic and pays less attention to what other people do to avoid it. The neurotic’s ultimate fear is that the big Other will “catch them” in the act of saying the taboo topic out loud and be punished for it.

Thus, we see how whereas the psychotic views themselves as “outside of” or “exempt from” the law, (“the law does not apply to me right now”), the neurotic views themselves as the victim of the law, “forced”, “coerced” or even “abused” by the symbolic law (“social norms only exist to psychologically torture me, I wish they did not exist but it seems to me like their only function right now is to test my capabilities of how well I can perform under them”).

 

VI: THE PERVERT’S RELATIONSHIP TO ACTING AND THE BIG OTHER

 

            When it comes to the topic of “acting” or “play-pretend” games, the subject with a perverted personality structure tells the big Other that they are lying or “acting”, but not in what way specifically.

            How would they respond in the examples already given? In the examples of a parent catching their child masturbating, a perverted parent could say “Let’s not talk about what happened last night”, without mentioning what happened last night. Now if, hypothetically, they had a guest eavesdropping on them, the guest would only find out that something happened last night, but not exactly what.

            In the Zizek joke about Stalinism, where a psychotic might say “Shut up, you’re not allowed to criticize the government here!”, a pervert might only say “Shut up, you’re not allowed to say that”. In other words, they are telling the big Other that they are not allowed to say something out of what they said, but not exactly what part of the discourse of the first guy who criticized Stalin.

The subject who has a perverted personality structure does not view themselves as “outside of” or “exempt from” the law, like the psychotic does, nor as “forced” or “coerced” by the symbolic law, like the neurotic. Instead, the pervert views themselves as the law itself (“I am the law”). If the neurotics really feel psychologically tortured by social norms, then it is the perverted subjects who psychologically torture them.

If we assume that the social norms that prohibit explicit discussion of taboo topics are an enactment of “the desire of the big Other”, so to speak, then it fully explains this quote of Lacan about perversion:

 

"The subject here makes himself the instrument of the Other's enjoyment."

(Jacques Lacan; Écrits: A Selection, 1977. p. 320)

 

            It must be clear that by “perversion” we do not mean a person who is fully comfortable talking about sex, feces, negative feelings, the censored topics of an authoritarian government or whatever else is “taboo” to talk about. Not at all, they are usually just as uncomfortable talking about them as a neurotic. Despite all this, what makes them perverted is that they respond to taboo with excitement instead of (just) anxiety. Thus, the closer a conversation gets to a “taboo” topic, the more excited the pervert feels. Anxiety may still be present to a certain extent, but what characterizes the pervert first and foremost is feeling powerful around taboo topics. The more a conversation is fundamentally based on beating around the bush of a taboo topic, the more the pervert feels like they have more power. In this way, they are diametrically opposed to the neurotic personality, who feel like they lose power the more “taboo” a conversation gets.

            How can this happen, a person feeling both uncomfortable around a topic and powerful at the same time? The catch is this: the pervert realizes that they are not the only one avoiding the topic. Thus, where all neurotics are “walking around on eggshells” to avoid a taboo topic, the perverts seek to be the ones who set the rules for how to walk around on eggshells in the first place.

            Thus, one thing that often happens is a pervert intentionally bringing up a taboo topic (usually sex) just for the sake of making other people uncomfortable, thus indirectly having power over them. This is why they are called „perverts”. Yes, the pervert may also be uncomfortable talking about the taboo, but they could, for instance, use a „first-mover advantage” – „Everyone will beat around the bush around this topic, but by my own rules”.

            To make an analogy, you can view the taboo topic as a bunch of lasers that you must not touch because they will burn you. Now imagine one of those movies with spies where they must carefully go from one place to another while avoiding touching all the lasers, almost like a game of Twister:

 

 

               How does each structure react to those „lasers” that symbolize the taboo topic? The psychotic will avoid touching them, until they get too tired of doing it and will eventually close their eyes, thinking that the lasers do not exist anymore because they can’t see the lasers, and then just walk into them. The neurotic will carefully avoid touching the lasers. The pervert will also avoid touching the lasers, just like the neurotic, while also holding a remote control that changes the positions of the lasers themselves.

            Not all perverts need to be evil manipulators who “psychologically torture” neurotics. But if the pervert happens to also have an evil intent, they can use their personality structure to their own advantage in order to manipulate people. One way they could do this is to intentionally “sexualize” a topic that was previously non-sexual. The moment they start indirectly hinting at something sexual, everyone else around them will start getting uncomfortable, avoiding talking about the topic, but avoiding by the rules of the pervert. The pervert will follow their own rules, since they are not “outside the law”, like a psychotic. Hence, the pervert will also avoid talking about the sexual (or somehow taboo) topic, as well, but will have the advantage of being prepared for it.

            This is why the pervert takes the position of the name of the father in social situations (or, like Bruce Fink says, the pervert seeks to bring the law into existence). In a situation of “acting”, the pervert seeks to be not only an actor but also the director of the play. The pervert simultaneously operates at two levels: on one hand, I have a public persona, where I act just like a neurotic would. On the other hand, I also subtly manipulate the rules of the conversation itself. Thus, they are not only conversing (from the persona, the “actor”) but also meta-conversing (from the name of the father, the “director”).

            In this way, the pervert has power over the taboo. That is not to say that they decide what is taboo or not, no one can decide that: sexuality will always be a bit taboo, human excrements will always be a bit taboo, and we will always at least partially avoid saying our negative sentiments to strangers or distant acquaintances in formal situations. These subjects will always provoke “we are both thinking of the same thing but we avoid saying it out loud” situations. What the pervert seeks control over, however, is the level of taboo-ness of a conversation, not by deciding how taboo a topic is (which no one can), but by deciding how much the conversation revolves around a topic that is taboo or not in the first place. In the case where the taboo is “sex”, the pervert seeks to have control over how sexual a conversation is, potentially seeking to make it more and more sexual for personal gain (knowing that other people will become shy or awkward around it, letting the pervert take charge of the conversation). In the case where the taboo is “our boss’s corrupt deal with our colleague”, then the pervert could intentionally try to bring that topic up in situations where it is unrelated, for the same reasons.

EDIT: I feel that I should elaborate a bit more on the perverted stance, and what it exactly means that the pervert makes themselves "the instrument of the Other's enjoyment".

            We have to understand that whenever our personal desires are considered "taboo" (which is very often the case in formal situations, at large psychological distances, but not only - it could also happen with close friends and family), then we feel exposed and vulnerable whenever our desire is pointed to the big Other. The most cliché scenarios, again, revolve around love and sexuality. Whenever people, especially younger children, have it pointed out to them that they have a crush on someone else, they may blush, get embarrassed, deny it, etc. even in the cases where everyone already knew (because now the big Other also knows). Or, take the scenario from above: at work, hating your boss is a "taboo" desire, even if your boss finds out, you still have to pretend that it is not true. Or, take the scenario in which a teacher knows that you are mad at them and you are cussing them out in your imagination, and they have no problem with that, but when they overhear you cussing them out to your deskmate, they get mad. Why would they get mad when they hear you say out loud what they already knew you were thinking? They are pissed that you let the big Other find out.

            How does the pervert abuse this situation? The pervert points out the taboo desires of the other person to the other person, making the other person uncomfortable/vulnerable/exposed/shy/embarrassed/anxious/etc. in order to compensate for their own discomfort around the taboo desire. The perverted formula can, thus, be summarized as follows: "I know that you are enjoying yourself through me". This is what it means that the pervert is the instrument of the Other's enjoyment.

            Thus, in a romantic scenario, the pervert knows that everyone, perhaps even including themselves, may become uncomfortable when their own desire is pointed out. Thus, one way a pervert could flirt with others is to avoid communicating (in a more direct or indirect way) their own desire and instead point out (in a more direct or indirect way) the Other's desire, by the general formula: "I know that you are into me".

            We could say the same thing about "the teacher scenario": all students hate the teacher, the teacher knows that all students are thinking mean stuff about them, the students know that the teacher knows, but everyone avoids pointing it out. If the teacher is perverted, one way they could obtain enjoyment is by fucking with the students and hinting at the fact that all of them are thinking mean stuff about the teacher (the taboo desire of the students) and then lay back and watch all of them make desperate efforts to deny it.