Routledge The Age of Perversion: Desire and Technology in Psychoanalysis and Culture (Psychoanalysis in a New Key Book Series)

American Board and Academy of Psychoanalysis Book Prize Winner for 2018 (Theoretical Category) We have entered the age of perversion, an era in which we are becoming more like machines and they more like us.The Age of Perversion explores the sea changes occurring in sexual and social life, made possible by the ongoing technological revolution, and demonstrates how psychoanalysts can understand and work with manifestations of perversion in clinical settings. Until now theories of perversion have limited their scope of inquiry to sexual behavior and personal trauma. The authors of this book widen that inquiry to include the social and political sphere, tracing perversion’s existential roots to the human experience of being a conscious animal troubled by the knowledge of death. Offering both creative and destructive possibilities, perversion challenges boundaries and norms in every area of life and involves transgression, illusion casting, objectification, dehumanization, and the radical quest for transcendence. This volume presents several clinical cases, including a man who lived with and loved a sex doll, a woman who wanted to be a Barbie doll, and an Internet sex addict. Also examined are cases of widespread social perversion in corporations, the mental health care industry, and even the government. In considering the continued impact of technology, the authors discuss how it is changing the practice of psychotherapy. They speculate about what the future may hold for a species who will redefine what it means to be human more in the next few decades than during any other time in human history. The Age of Perversion provides a novel examination of the convergence of perversion and technology that will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists, social workers, mental health counselors, sex therapists, sexologists, roboticists, and futurists, as well as social theorists and students and scholars of cultural studies. Review The Age of Perversion is a riveting (pun intended!) existential psychodynamic account of perversion in the 21st century. Building on Freud's pioneering insights -- fortified by wide-ranging interdisciplinary scholarship, clinical case studies, and empirical inquiry -- Knafo and Lo Bosco explain how perversity, for better and worse, is the inevitable manifestation of self-conscious human animals protesting their corporeality and finitude: desperately striving to maintain a sense of meaning and value in a sexually saturated, narcissistically inflated, commercially inundated, technologically permeated, rapidly changing cultural milieu. Playful, profound, and provocative; a must read."-Sheldon Solomon, Author, The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life "Knafo and LoBosco have written a veritable atlas of human perversion, which includes, among its delights and surprises, the perverse practices of the NSA, the APA, and the Vatican. Knafo, a renowned analyst, takes us into her consulting room where she works with men who marry dolls and women desperate to look like dolls while Lo Bosco illuminates the perversity of various corporate practices. The authors leave the reader thinking differently not only about sexual acts but also about the perverse strategies we all use to violate boundaries, toy with the forbidden, and deny death. This disturbing and remarkable book makes it clear that the very way we define our humanity is changing before our eyes." -Deborah Anna Luepnitz, Ph.D., Author, Schopenhauer's Porcupines: Intimacy and its Dilemmas. "Through their exquisite clinical/sociocultural observations, Knafo and Lo Bosco render virtual, robotic relations frighteningly sensible. With depth and breadth, they broaden the gender spectrum to include dolls, robots, gynoids and androids. They describe perverse forms of relating as psychogenetically adaptive, salvation-seeking efforts while warning that the capacity to damage social life is profound. The authors also