with the united contrast of male and female in bisexuality, the
significance of which is reduced in psychoanalysis to the contrast of
activity and passivity.


3. GENERAL STATEMENTS APPLICABLE TO ALL PERVERSIONS

*Variation and Disease.*--The physicians who at first studied the
_perversions_ in pronounced cases and under peculiar conditions were
naturally inclined to attribute to them the character of a morbid or
degenerative sign similar to the _inversions_. This view, however, is
easier to refute in this than in the former case. Everyday experience
has shown that most of these transgressions, at least the milder ones,
are seldom wanting as components in the sexual life of normals who look
upon them as upon other intimacies. Wherever the conditions are
favorable such a perversion may for a long time be substituted by a
normal person for the normal sexual aim or it may be placed near it. In
no normal person does the normal sexual aim lack some designable
perverse element, and this universality suffices in itself to prove the
inexpediency of an opprobrious application of the name perversion. In
the realm of the sexual life one is sure to meet with exceptional
difficulties which are at present really unsolvable, if one wishes to
draw a sharp line between the mere variations within physiological
limits and morbid symptoms.

Nevertheless, the quality of the new sexual aim in some of these
perversions is such as to require special notice. Some of the
perversions are in content so distant from the normal that we cannot
help calling them "morbid," especially those in which the sexual
impulse, in overcoming the resistances (shame, loathing, fear, and pain)