The Perverse Father: When Love Becomes a Trap

 


He wasn’t obviously cruel.
He smiled. Sometimes, he laughed.
Sometimes, he held you in a way that made you believe—just for a moment—that the world was safe.

But cruelty doesn’t always announce itself with a whip.
Sometimes, it seduces.
Sometimes, it withholds.
Sometimes, it tortures quietly—in ways so subtle, so enduring, they echo through a lifetime.

This isn’t a personal diary—though it could be.
It’s a map of a kind of fatherhood that has marked many lives, including mine:
Fathers who love by dominating, who enjoy through deception, who mask abuse with charm and authority.

The perverse father

What Is a Perverse Father?

The term "perverse" often gets lost in moral panic and sexualized caricature. But in Lacanian psychoanalysis, perversion is not primarily about acts — it is about structure. Specifically: a père-version — a psychic configuration in which the child turns toward the father not as a bearer of symbolic law or a storyteller of limits, but as one who enjoys beyond the law, who makes the law, and positions the child to fit into that enjoyment. In this structure, the father is elevated to a figure who embodies both authority and transgression — and the child aligns with him, not to be protected, but to participate in a form of enjoyment where they themselves are the object and instrument of his desire.

The perverse subject rejects symbolic castration—the limit of the law, the “no” that separates desire from total satisfaction. Rather than submitting to the law, he positions himself as its executor or exception. He becomes the one who “knows what you really want,” who stages your desire for you, and who derives jouissance—a painful, excessive enjoyment—from manipulating the desire of others.

The perverse father is not just a liar. He is the lie. A man who does not simply deceive others but has built his entire subjectivity on a fiction—one where he is always in control, always desired, always innocent.

How Does He Appear?

He may be charismatic, even saintly, in public. But behind the charm lies a different face—one of calculated seduction, manipulative guilt, sudden abandonment, or emotional blackmail.

These behavioral guises can correspond to deeper psychological structures or clinical profiles that help us understand the father’s psyche:

  • The Don Juan: Seductive, unavailable, loyal to no one but his desire. He needs to be loved but cannot love. His children often become accidental spectators of his endless hunt.

  • The Martyr: Always sacrificing himself for others, yet quietly punishing everyone for his supposed generosity. He makes you feel guilty for needing him.

  • The Tyrant: Harsh, unpredictable, controlling. He may never hit, but he wounds with words, with silence, with absence.

  • The Joker: Funny, likable, never serious. But you can’t pin him down. He slips away from responsibility, leaving confusion in his wake.

Clinical Faces: Narcissist, Psychopath, or Pervert?

While Lacan resists reducing psychic structures to fixed clinical categories, for those grappling with such a father in everyday life, it's natural to wonder: how might this structure manifest in recognized psychological profiles?

  • The Narcissist sees others as mirrors. He gives affection only when it reflects his ego. He abandons or attacks when others fail to affirm his grandiosity.

  • The Psychopath sees others as tools. He feels no guilt, only calculation. His manipulations are cold, his charm strategic, his remorse theatrical.

  • The Pervert, in Lacanian terms, is something more radical. He is not simply exploiting others—he is staging the entire scene of desire. He offers himself as the object of enjoyment, or as the agent who delivers the law in a distorted form.
    He enacts fantasies where boundaries dissolve and the symbolic law is bypassed. These dissolutions can manifest in many ways: emotional confusion, public abandonment, or even the transgression of sexual boundaries.

When Love Becomes Enjoyment

Perversion, for Lacan, is a structural defense against the void of castration—the lack at the heart of the subject. The perverse father constructs his universe to deny this lack. He stages seduction, cruelty, or sacrifice to convince himself—and you—that he is whole, complete, beyond need. In doing so, he dissolves conventions, social norms, and morality itself.

These dissolutions—of what should be—manifest in forms the child learns to read as a game: emotional manipulation, public abandonment, or even the transgression of sexual boundaries. All these become the father’s rules. And so, they must be okay.

He may deny your existence in public while whispering that you’re his favorite in private.
He may oscillate between warmth and coldness with surgical precision, keeping you suspended in confusion—always chasing that moment of real love that never returns.

He may not hit you.
But he will haunt you.
Because his power lies not in his fists, but in the stories he writes about you—
and forces you to live inside.

Can He Be Happy?

That question haunts many children of such fathers.
And the answer may be: he doesn’t know.

His world is structured around jouissance, not happiness. And jouissance is not joy—it is excess, pain, thrill, domination. It feeds on others, but never nourishes.

In this sense, he is a prisoner of his own theatre.
Always acting. Never real.
Always in control. Never loved.

What You Will Never Get

You won’t change him.
There will be no epiphany. No sudden awakening. No letter of apology written with trembling hands. No retroactive embrace that finally rewrites your past.

Why?

Because in his logic, there is no true Other.
No one to answer to. No one whose feelings are real unless they serve his narrative.
He is the law. He is the author.
And you? You’re either a prop or a threat.

Waiting for him to change is like waiting for the mirror to speak.

From Survival to Strength

What, then, is left for the child of such a father?

The truth.

The truth that you were used—not seen, not loved, but used—for his own psychic economy.
This truth, though bitter, is liberating.

Because in that recognition lies your subjectivization:

  • You are no longer caught in his fantasy.

  • You no longer chase the missing piece.

  • You stop hoping for reparation from someone who can only repeat.

And this, paradoxically, is the beginning of strength.

The child of a perverse father often becomes a question in flesh.
A question about worth, desire, love.
But in refusing to play the role he assigned you, you become the one who writes.
Not the puppet—but the poet.

You are not his mirror.
You are not his fantasy.
You are not his object.

You are a subject.
And that is something he can never truly see—
But you can, now.

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