Nevertheless such clarity and simplicity by no means creates a line that it is comfortable to hem to. As he writes:
The poor, the child, and Freud call us back to our original nest; they take us back to our own, egocentric and somatocentric, world, from which we set sail for our centrifugal and abstract adventure. Hence also the ironic and violent effect that this reduction produces inside us: it throws our addiction to the impulses of the flesh into our face, mocking our pretence of flying too high. (Benvenuto 2016: xxxv-xxxvi)
It is precisely to such unsettling kernels that the psychoanalyst must remain in fidelity and take her bearings, while the trappings of psychoanalysis – its complex terminology, the transferences and identifications with particular theorists and schools, and its rituals of couch, session length and frequency, etc. – can and must be allowed to fall away, in a refusal, or askesis (a favorite word of Benvenuto’s) of the ballast they provide. Within this reduced matrix, each of us must find our own way of being a psychoanalyst. And here, too, Benvenuto’s approach is in fidelity to Freud’s earliest recommendations: ‘I do not venture to deny that a physician quite differently constituted might find himself driven to adopt a different attitude to his patients and to the task before him’ (Freud 1912: 111). And to the spirit of Freud’s technique, ‘a very simple one’ which is nonetheless impossible.
Benvenuto’s eschewal of any handy positioning is immediately evident in his primary references in the perversion book. Besides Freud, the primary influences on his thought, from the sprawling psychoanalytic literature on perversions, are Masud Khan, Jacques Lacan, and Robert Stoller. At first blush, three more different thinkers and writers could scarcely be imagined, and yet an underlying familiarity exists. ‘Yet beyond these vast differences, these three authors have something in common: the three of them have been at the margins of the IPA, the psychoanalytic establishment’ (Benvenuto 2016: xxxviii). Each occupied a position, as Benvenuto acknowledges, that was in its own right perverse: ‘minority, nonconformist, conflictual’ (xxxviii), as does he. These thinkers, as well, were unusual in opening psychoanalysis up to neighboring fields: Khan to the literary, Lacan to philosophy, logic, mathematics, as well as to the arts, and Stoller to socio-psychological survey research (xxxix). With the epistemological reduction of psychoanalysis to a more and more minimalist theoria and praxis, cross pollination with neighboring fields takes on an ever greater significance. This is suggestive of Benvenuto’s own practice as a philosopher as well as a psychoanalyst.