The main contention is that in perversion the main clinical factor is hostility. It combines with sexual desire to produce the various forms that perversion can take on. Stoller shows that the perverse scene aims not only at denying castration, but also at securing a more solid basis for a jeopardized sexual identity. Risk, vengeance and trauma are some of the ideas that the author discusses while building up his argument

A previously unpublished work by the author. 'It was like discovering a previously unknown recording by the Beatles. On a 2007 visit to the author's widow, Sybil, she handed me a manuscript. The author's last book had been placed in a publishing queue by his retiring editor. After the author''s death Sybil was told that the publisher had discontinued psychoanalytic books. It languished on a home shelf in Los Angeles for sixteen years. I was holding the final work by psychoanalysis's most eloquent writer on sex.' - From the Foreword by Dr Richard Green