Response to Claude Balier: a Jungian approach to perversion

The author refers to Claude Balier’s hypothesis, that of the fantasy of a return to the One, within a Jungian perspective. He emphasizes three defining characteristics of perverse acts: the release of energy into an act, invariably destructive, and organized according to a scenario resembling ritual religious sacrifice. On the basis of Jungian theories of the libido and archetype, and drawing upon Michael Fordham’s work on the primary self, the author develops a hypothesis according to which the teleological trajectory of the self can, in certain cases, reverse itself and become a process of pure destructiveness.