Craving for Polymorphous Perverse Relationships

Abstract

Abstract This essay explores the craving for polymorphous perverse relationships of a son of a Holocaust survivor mother. The material presents the interplay of two levels which shaped the patient’s character structure and object-relating: the active behavior of the mother to her developing child and the mother’s internal struggles, which the son could not help but sense and accommodate. This theme is illustrated by means of a detailed description of the first phases of a case study, in which the patient realized that he enacted his own pathological relationship with his mother, as well as his mother’s traumatic Holocaust past through his polymorphous perverse relationships. This enactment, which was also expressed in the transference, was achieved by means of a compulsive, repetitive technique of intimacy, which served to hide a weak, unintegrated self, and which decreased his sexual and affective needs.