Perversion of Love aims to explore the reasons why we as Christians may struggle to love ourselves and others through the lens of what Dr. Gary Chapman defined, and what has been accepted by popular culture, as the five love languages. Christians have been given a Great Commission which is to spread the Gospel and make disciples. The method by which we fulfill this commission is the greatest commandments-to love God and love our neighbors as ourselves. God created us to love, but we have an enemy whose goal is to destroy everything that God created, and his favorite method of destruction is perversion-the distortion, corruption, or alteration of a thing from its original course or design. So it makes sense that our enemy would seek to pervert the way we love ourselves and others in his attempt to stop the spread of the Gospel. So how does this perversion take place? I believe the enemy attacks us through our primary love language(s) and uses our very own parents as unwitting (and sometimes witting) participants to carry out his plan. Since we all receive love differently, the enemy will attack us in different ways, but there are some common tactics he uses depending on our love language. If we can learn to recognize the enemy's tactics for what they were/are, we can start the process of breaking the cycle of perversion in our lives and the generations to come. In doing so, we can learn to fully love God, ourselves, and others, and we will fulfill the purpose for which we were designed.

From long before the Trojan War to the ethnic cleansings of our own century, people have often used their potential to treat other human beings as things. It is this treatment of another person as a thing rather than as a human being that the eminent psychoanalyst, Dr. Sheldon Bach, sees as a perversion of object relationships and that forms the background of this powerful book. Perversion is a lack of capacity for whole object love, and while this includes the sexual perversions it also includes certain character perversions, character disorders and psychotic conditions. Dr. Bach's clinical work has led him to conclude that sexual perversions are generally inconsistent with whole object love. Therapeutic experience suggests that the pathways to object love may be strewn with outgrown and discarded sexual perversions. But whether a sexual perversion per se exists or not, the issue of how it happens that one person can degrade another to the status of a thing is an issue of importance not only for the psychoanalysis of character but for our larger understanding of human nature as well. Perversions are attempts to simplistically resolve or defend against some of the central paradoxes of human existence. How is it possible for us to be born of someone's flesh yet be separate from them, or to live in one's own experience yet observe oneself from the outside? How are we able to deal with feelings of being both male and female, child and adult, or to negotiate between the worlds of internal and external stimulation? People with perversions have special difficulty in dealing with the ambiguity of human relationships. They have not developed the transitional psychic space that would allow them to contain paradox, making it difficult for them to recognize the reality and legitimacy of multiple points of view. Thus they tend to think in either/or dichotomies, to search for dominant/submissive relationships and to perceive the world from idiosyncratically subjective or coldly objective perspectives. In this

Perversion of Love aims to explore the reasons why we as Christians may struggle to love ourselves and others through the lens of what Dr. Gary Chapman defined, and what has been accepted by popular culture, as the five love languages. Christians have been given a Great Commission which is to spread the Gospel and make disciples. The method by which we fulfill this commission is the greatest commandments-to love God and love our neighbors as ourselves. God created us to love, but we have an enemy whose goal is to destroy everything that God created, and his favorite method of destruction is perversion-the distortion, corruption, or alteration of a thing from its original course or design. So it makes sense that our enemy would seek to pervert the way we love ourselves and others in his attempt to stop the spread of the Gospel. So how does this perversion take place? I believe the enemy attacks us through our primary love language(s) and uses our very own parents as unwitting (and sometimes witting) participants to carry out his plan. Since we all receive love differently, the enemy will attack us in different ways, but there are some common tactics he uses depending on our love language. If we can learn to recognize the enemy's tactics for what they were/are, we can start the process of breaking the cycle of perversion in our lives and the generations to come. In doing so, we can learn to fully love God, ourselves, and others, and we will fulfill the purpose for which we were designed.

This Perversion Called Love positions one of Japan's most canonical and best translated 20th century authors at the center of contemporary debates in feminism. Examining sexual perversion in Tanizaki's aesthetic essays, cultural criticism, cinema writings and short novels from the 1930s, it argues that Tanizaki understands human subjectivity in remarkably Freudian terms, but that he is much more critical than Freud about what it means for the possibility of love. According to Tanizaki, perversion involves not the proliferation of interesting gender positions, but rather the tragic absence of even two sexes, since femininity is only defined as man's absence, supplement, or complement. In this fascinating work, author Margherita Long reads Tanizaki with a theoretical complexity he demands but has seldom received. As a critique of the historicist and gender-focused paradigms that inform much recent work in Japanese literary and cultural studies, This Perversion Called Love offers exciting new interpretations that should spark controversy in the fields of feminist theory and critical Asian studies.

But whether a sexual perversion per se exists or not, the issue of how it happens that one person can degrade another to the status of a thing is important not only for the psychoanalysis of character but for our larger understanding of human nature as well.

Analyzes the feelings and problems involved in different types of human love, including familial affection, friendship, passion, and charity.

Why, when we are desperately in love, do we endlessly block union with our love object? Why do we often destroy what we love most? Why do we search out the impossible object? Is it that we desire things because they are unavailable, and therefore, to keep desire alive, we need to prevent its fulfillment? Renata Salecl explores the distributing and complex relationships between love and hate, violence and admiration, libidinal and destructive drives, through an investigation of phenomenon as diverse as the novels The Age of Innocence and The Remains of the Day, classic Hollywood melodramas, the Sirens’ song, Ceaușescu's Rumania and the Russian performance artist Oleg Kulik, who acts like a dog and bites his audience. (Per)Versions of Love and Hate presents a unique and timely intervention in contemporary debates by questioning the legitimacy of the calls for tolerance and respect by multiculturalism and exploring practices such as body-mutilation as symptoms of the radical change that has affected subjectivity in contemporary society.