This collection, written by leading Lacanian psychoanalytic theorists and practitioners, is a unique exploration of the novel aspects of perversion from the perspective of crueltya psychoanalytic study that has never been sufficiently undertaken in an English-speaking world. Instead of reducing the notion of perversion to cultural representations, a historical discourse or a clinical diagnosis, the authors in this collection draw on Freud, Kant, Hegel, Marquis de Sade, Derrida, Deleuze and ´i¸ek to untie the knot of psychic cruelty intrinsic to perversion and therefore de-sexualize perverted acts. They do so by theorizing perversion in psychoanalytic concepts of the Oedipus complex, the-Name-of-the-Father and jouissance, and furthermore in the perspective of the clinics of neurosis and psychosis, in dialogue with a clinical praxis, philosophy and literature.

Chapter 1. Introduction: Psychoanalysis in the Bedroom.- Chapter 2. Cruelfictions of Psychoanalysis: Freud, Derrida, Mignotte.- Chapter 3. Intimate Cruelties: Perversions, Sexuality and the Human Animal.- Chapter 4. On the Right to Jouissance.- Chapter 5. A Perverse Fascination for Death and Jouissance: Bataille, Lacan and the Anti-social Turn in Queer Theory.- Chapter 6. Perversion after Freud: from the Cruel Father to the Joycean Clinic.- Chapter 7. The Anxiety at the Heart of Perverse Experience: A Clinical Perspective.- Chapter 8.  The Pornography of His Eyes: A Vignette of Perversion.- Chapter 9. Neoliberalism and Liminality: Perverse Cruelties in the Age of the Capitalist Discourse.