John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, published in 1952, is a sprawling family saga set largely in California’s Salinas Valley, following two generations of the Trask family and repeatedly returning to the biblical story of Cain and Abel. At its center are questions of inheritance, guilt, good and evil, and whether we are condemned to repeat what came before us or capable of choosing differently. The novel’s great moral concept is timshel — “thou mayest” — the idea that human beings are not simply prisoners of their origins.

Cathy Ames enters that story as one of Steinbeck’s most disturbing creations. Beautiful, intelligent, and extraordinarily skilled at reading other people, she first enters the lives of brothers Adam and Charles Trask after arriving badly injured and presenting herself as vulnerable. Adam falls in love with her and eventually marries her, projecting onto Cathy an innocence and fragility she does not possess. She becomes pregnant with twins, Aron and Cal, but motherhood does not produce the transformation Adam expects. Shortly after giving birth, Cathy shoots him when he tries to prevent her from leaving and abandons both her husband and her children.

She later reinvents herself as Kate, eventually taking control of a brothel where information, sexual desire and other people’s secrets become instruments of power. Her sons grow up without knowing who their mother really is, and when Cal eventually discovers the truth, Cathy becomes central to the novel’s great question: are we determined by what we inherit, or can we choose what to do with it? Cal fears that Cathy’s darkness may exist inside him as well, but East of Eden insists on the possibility of choice. It is precisely this contrast that makes Cathy so valuable to a psychoanalytic reading. She is not merely the villain of the story; Steinbeck constructs her as someone whose relationship with other human beings follows a remarkably consistent logic.

There are cruel characters, traumatized characters, violent characters, and deeply narcissistic characters. Not all of them are perverse. That is precisely where the difficulty begins, because in everyday language we tend to use the word “perversion” almost as a synonym for evil, sadism, or lack of morality, while in psychoanalysis the concept is far more specific. A perverse structure is not defined only by what someone does, but by the way that person relates to the law, to desire, and, above all, to the other.

That is why Cathy Ames, from East of Eden, remains such a fascinating character from a psychoanalytic perspective. John Steinbeck does not simply construct her as a woman who suffered and, as a result, became cruel. From the very beginning of the novel, he suggests something far more radical: Cathy observes human emotions, understands desire, identifies weaknesses, and recognizes the codes that organize relationships, yet she seems to do so from the outside. She knows what love, guilt, fear, protection, and desire mean to other people, and she uses that knowledge as a tool.

The new adaptation of East of Eden, created by Zoe Kazan and starring Florence Pugh, seems determined to revisit that construction. The trailer gives Cathy herself a line that, in the novel, belongs to the narrator: “I believe there are monsters born in this world to human parents.” The change is significant. The character Steinbeck described from the outside is now allowed to speak about herself, or at least about what she might be. It is a very contemporary move: giving the monster subjectivity, providing context, searching for origins, and asking what experiences produced that person.

The question is that context does not necessarily change structure.

What is a perverse structure?

In ordinary language, a “perverse” person would simply be someone particularly cruel. For psychoanalysis, that is not enough. Someone can act violently, humiliate others, betray them, or destroy relationships without that automatically allowing us to conclude that a perverse structure is present. Likewise, a person organized around a perverse structure does not have to spend their life committing crimes or spectacular acts of cruelty. The central issue lies in the mode of relating.

In a perverse structure, the other risks no longer being fully recognized as a subject of desire and instead becomes assigned a function within the scene constructed by the perverse subject. The other may be the one who admires, suffers, desires, forbids, punishes, witnesses, or is manipulated. The other matters, but often matters precisely because they perform a necessary role.

This is what separates perversion from simple indifference. The perverse subject does not necessarily ignore the other. Quite often, they need to understand the other very well. They need to know what that person desires, fears, hides, or fantasizes about to occupy a particular position in relation to them. And this is exactly where Cathy Ames is extraordinary.

Cathy understands people perfectly

From a very young age, Cathy realizes that people have vulnerable points, and she learns how to use them. She lies, manipulates, seduces, and rearranges situations in ways that leave others occupying positions she has already anticipated. She is not simply an impulsive character ruled by rage. There is observation involved.

Cathy reads other people’s desires. She understands what each person wants to believe and offers precisely that image for as long as it remains useful. To some, she can appear as a victim; to others, as an object of desire; to Adam Trask, she becomes the helpless woman who needs to be saved.

Adam believes he knows Cathy because he is in love with her. In reality, what he knows most intimately is what he has projected onto her. Cathy understands the projection and knows exactly how to use it.

The other as an instrument

Perhaps this is the most obvious aspect of Cathy’s character when viewed through the lens of perversion: people seem to acquire value according to the function they can perform.

Adam offers protection. Other men offer money, pleasure, information, or power. When someone stops fulfilling a particular function, Cathy is capable of detaching herself with an ease that shocks those who imagined that a bond existed between them in the same way it existed for them.

This does not simply mean that Cathy “cannot love.” The issue is more complicated. What matters is the asymmetry of the relationship. While the other person imagines they are participating in a bond between two subjects, Cathy often appears to be organizing a scene in which she already knows the role that person is supposed to perform.

This is precisely where fiction can help us recognize something that, in real life, rarely appears in such concentrated form. Perverse relationships can be marked by a subtle displacement: one person believes they are living a relationship, while the other seems to be managing a structure.

The law exists to be circumvented

Another important point is that perversion does not mean being unaware of rules. Cathy knows the rules very well. She understands which behaviors are permitted, which will be condemned, and which stories must be told to produce a specific reaction. The limit exists, and precisely because it exists, it can be used, tested, or crossed.

This becomes even clearer when Cathy becomes Kate and begins running a brothel. Information becomes power, secrets become currency, and desire can be transformed into an instrument of control. She is not outside society. On the contrary, she understands its hypocrisies well enough to exploit them.

This distinction matters because we often imagine the perverse subject as someone incapable of recognizing limits. In many cases, the opposite may be closer to the truth: the limit is perfectly recognizable, but the person establishes a particular relationship with it.

Perversion is not the absence of emotional intelligence

There is another common misconception: that someone capable of manipulating emotions must necessarily be incapable of understanding them.

Cathy demonstrates the opposite. She has an extraordinary ability to observe human behavior. She recognizes vanity, guilt, fear, desire, and the need for approval. What seems to be missing is not necessarily the cognitive understanding of another person’s emotions. What seems to be missing is something else.

Recognizing that someone is suffering does not automatically stop her from using that suffering. Knowing that someone loves her does not mean that love must be protected. Understanding another person’s vulnerability may simply mean discovering where pressure can most effectively be applied.

Perhaps this is one of fiction’s most disturbing representations of perversion: not a person who is unable to read others, but someone who reads them extremely well and uses that knowledge without being restrained by the affective response that would ordinarily introduce a limit.

The contemporary problem of explaining the monster

This is exactly where the new version of East of Eden becomes especially interesting.

Contemporary fiction is deeply uncomfortable with characters who are simply evil. We want to understand where they came from, what traumas they endured, who hurt them, and what social structures contributed to their formation. This can be an important movement because it breaks away from simplistic moral explanations. But it can also produce another kind of simplification. Not every destructive behavior needs to be explained by a single original wound.

Giving a character a traumatic childhood does not necessarily change the way that character relates to others. Trauma and structure are not interchangeable concepts. A person can have suffered enormously and still establish relationships based on instrumentalization, domination, or disregard for the desire of the other.

This is where the attempt to update Cathy may risk becoming anachronistic. Not because an adaptation cannot expand on what Steinbeck wrote. Of course it can. But because our contemporary need to find psychological causes behind every form of cruelty may soften precisely what was most radical about the character. Steinbeck gives us a woman who may not be asking to be explained.

The essence lies in the relationship, not the biography

That is why, even if Zoe Kazan gives Cathy new experiences, wounds, or explanations, the psychoanalytic question will remain the same: what does she do with the other?

Can she recognize another person’s desire without respecting it? Do people continue to function as instruments? Does the bond exist only while it serves a purpose? Does another person’s vulnerability evoke care, or does it create opportunity? Is the law recognized as a limit, or used as an element within a scene?

These questions are much more useful than simply searching for events capable of explaining why Cathy became Cathy.

Because structure appears less in what someone tells us about their own history than in the repetition of a particular way of relating. It is the repetition that reveals the functioning.

How to recognize perverse characters in fiction

Literature and cinema offer a privileged laboratory because they make patterns more visible. When we follow a character for years or across hundreds of pages, we can observe how different relationships eventually reproduce the same logic.

Perverse characters are often extremely attentive to the desire of others. They know exactly what a particular person wants to hear, see, or believe. They can alter their own position according to the demands of the scene and may provoke intense emotions in others without necessarily taking responsibility for the effect they produce.

A particular relationship with limits also appears frequently. It is not simply a matter of violating them impulsively. There may be enjoyment in mastering the rule, manipulating expectation, and placing another person in the desired position.

But perhaps the most important sign is always the same: observing whether the other continues to be recognized as a subject or begins to function primarily as an object within someone else’s construction.

Cathy Ames offers something close to a fictional manual of this mechanism.

Cathy does not need to stop being human to remain perverse

The Netflix adaptation may do something interesting by giving the character a richer inner life. Cathy may experience fear, anger, desire, resentment, or loneliness. She may carry traumas and experiences that Steinbeck chose not to develop. None of that, by itself, would dismantle a reading of her structure.

Perhaps that is precisely the most important point. Perverse people are not creatures from another species. They do not need to be supernatural monsters, completely cold, or incapable of emotion. They can suffer, desire, and carry complicated histories. The question is not whether there is humanity inside them. There is. The psychoanalytic question lies in observing what they do with the humanity of the other.

And that is why Cathy Ames remains such a valuable character more than 70 years after her creation. Zoe Kazan may contextualize her, Florence Pugh may make her more contradictory, and the series may uncover nuances that Steinbeck deliberately left aside. But if the structure remains, Cathy will still be Cathy. Perhaps that is where the real power of East of Eden lies: not in asking whether monsters exist, but in showing that perversion can exist perfectly well inside someone who remains entirely human.