Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of US

Jesse Bering's book, Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us, looks at how childhood experiences affect the sexual tastes of animals. For instance, male goats raised by sheep are sexually attracted to sheep when they mature. Females are more flexible. This review of the book in the New York Times begins with a citation from Freud's Three Essays:

“The finding of an object,” Sigmund Freud wrote a century ago in his “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality,” “is in fact a refinding of it.” The patterns and paths our lusts will take, what we will yearn to do and have done to us and whom we will wish to do these things with — to a great extent, our erotic longings are laid down early, beginning in childhood and even infancy. Freud has lost currency in recent decades, but few in the field of sex research, no matter how they qualify his premise or dismiss him as unscientific, would argue that our early experiences don’t have the power to profoundly shape our later cravings ...