The Mind of the Paedophile

Psychoanalytic Perspectives

Loretta R. Loeb

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367107406
• eBook ISBN: 9780429921452
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The Mind of the Paedophile discusses one of the most controversial and misunderstood subjects in the psychoanalytic arena today - paedophilia. A variety of treatments and therapies, including brain surgery, electric shock treatment and incarceration, have not succeeded in treating this condition. In this volume, a range of eminent and expert professionals go further: into the mind of the paedophile, using dream interpretation, free association, fantasies and memories, in a bid to comprehend the exact nature; the how, when and why, of paedophilia.

Chapter One
A psychoanalytic classification of the paedophilias: two clinical illustrations

Charles W. Socarides

Theoretical Section

In 1967, I first suggested that the genesis of well-structured¹ perversions may well be the result of disturbances that occur earlier than had been generally assumed, namely in the preoedipal phase. The challenge confronting us was to understand clinical forms of the same perversion, from the mildest to the well-structured perversion, to that occurring in an individual with a florid psychosis. Paedophilia, for example, could be classified in the following way: oedipal paedophilia, pre-oedipal paedophilia, and schizo-paedophilia. My classification demonstrated that the same phenomenology may have different structures in different individuals.

The situational and variational forms of paedophilia are considered non-clinical forms of sexual perversion. The former is characterized by (1) environmental inaccessibility to adult partners of the opposite sex; (2) consciously motivated behaviour; (3) paedophile acts that are not fear-induced but arise out of conscious deliberation and choice; (4) the ability to function with an adult partner of the opposite sex; and (5) a flexible sexual pattern that allows individuals to return to adult opposite-sex partners when they are available.

The motivations underlying the variational form of paedophiliac behaviour are as varied as the motivations driving men and women to pursue dependency, seek security, wreak vengeance, or experience specialized sensations. They may be entirely a product of individual enterprise, contrary to the general social order. The behaviour is consciously motivated, and paedophile acts are not fear-induced but arise out of conscious deliberation and choice. The person is able to function with an adult partner of the opposite sex. The sexual pattern is flexible, and these individuals do return to adult opposite-sex partners when they so prefer. Variational paedophilia may occur in individuals who seek to gratify the desire for an alternation of sexual excitement, often for reasons of impotence or near impotence. In latent forms of paedophilia the patient may live without being aware of this condition in its milder forms, being able for many years to tolerate its various negative influences on his general health. Latent forms of this perversion may erupt into oedipal, pre-oedipal, or schizo-paedophilia. Fleeting sexual impulses towards children occurring in the course of handling or observing the child are frequent, however, and are often reported during psychoanalytic therapy. Such fantasies or even enactments do not necessarily signify that the patient is suffering from a paedophiliac perversion. Considerable numbers of individuals may be engaging in paedophiliac behaviour. Often fleeting periodic paedophiliac fantasies are reported by patients with intense fears of the opposite sex, together with suppressed (rarely expressed) paedophiliac tendencies. In this group is the sudden appearance of a paedophile perversion in the elderly or late-middle-aged whose sexual patterns have been altered by multiple psychological or organic brain changes accompanying ageing, trauma, or neoplasm. Often individuals in the course of making a transition from certain psychotic states (often paranoid) to neurotic symptomatology (or in the opposite direction), pass through a transitional-symptom phase of paedophilia or other perverse formation—for example, exhibitionism and voyeurism. This phenomenon was first described by Glover (1933). Rare acts of paedophiliac behaviour, reacted to with anxiety, may appear in the manifest content of dreams of these who temporarily retreat from adult sexuality to a less threatening infantile sexual-object choice. Some adults have engaged in brief and isolated sexual contact with prepubertal children in the context of a seductive, curious child and in the state of drug intoxication. This may represent a loosening of impulse control and regression secondary to frustration. As a rule, these acts are not stereotyped nor are they the sole avenue for the individual’s sexual gratification and are transitory. High incidence of sexual abuse of children reported to the authorities beginning in the 1980s leads one to conjecture that there may be a “facultative” or “epidemic” form of non-clinical paedophilia similar to that which has been reported as regards the increase in sexual promiscuity. Such epidemic or facultative forms of behaviour have been known to occur at times of social disequilibrium and where these is no “authoritative prohibition by society” (Freud, 1905d, p. 222) against sexual license. As noted by Fenichel (1945), “children are weak and remain approachable when other objects are excluded through anxiety. . . . It is true that sometimes . . . superficial reasons may suffice for persons to be attracted by children” (p. 333). As Freud (1911b) noted, there is a much longer dominance of the pleasure principle over the reality principle in the evolution of human erotism. They are living relics of the ancient expression, adulation, and primacy of instinctual discharge processes in which the belief in the value of the sexual object per se was secondary to instinctual discharge. Such activities constitute the “weak spot in our psychical organization”. “An essential part of the psychical disposition to neurosis indeed lies in the delay of educating the sexual instincts to pay regard to reality, and . . . in the condition which makes this delay possible” (Freud, 1911b, p. 223).

In contrast, the true paedophiliac is one who out of inner necessity must engage in sexual relations with a prepubertal child (before the development of secondary sex characteristics) in order to achieve sexual gratification and to obtain relief from unconscious conflicts. The diagnosis of paedophilia can therefore only be made after a rigorous study of the patient’s sexual history and the developmental phases that he has traversed.

A brief review of the psychoanalytic literature

Well-structured paedophiliac perversions are not uncommon but have received scant psychoanalytic attention, for they do not present themselves for treatment. Those who undergo treatment greatly fear the possibility that disclosure of their identities and others who enter it are prone to premature interruption. Fenichel (1945), in his Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis, devotes only two short paragraphs to this perversion. He concluded that this “love” for children was based on a narcissistic object choice. Karpman (1950) reported a case of paedophilia in which the patient’s conflict seemed to centre around a fear of pubic hair in women. It constituted a traumatic experience in the patient’s childhood which he avoided by substituting harmless girls of prepubertal age. He noted the importance of incorporative elements, being swallowed by the pubic hair, but the developmental aspects of the ego as defence mechanisms were not clarified. He reported a twenty-year cure with the enucleation of the traumatic episode. Cassity (1927) reviewed the literature up to that time, including the contributions of Krafft-Ebing, Havelock Ellis, Magnan, Bleuler, Stekel, and Hadley, and presented four cases treated by himself. He underscored the following aetiological factors: (1) the early loss of the breast (weaning trauma), provoking strong retaliative tendencies, which were alleviated through forcing the love-object to gratify oral cravings and, at the same time, dominating and controlling them; and (2) the avoidance of castration anxiety by choosing a love-object like one’s self. Freud (1905d) in the Three Essays stated that it is “only exceptionally that children are the exclusive sexual object. They usually come to play that part when someone who is cowardly or who has become impotent adopts them as a substitute, or when an urgent instinct (one that will not allow of postponement) cannot at the moment get possession of any more appropriate object. Even hunger does not permit of such cheapening—that is, variation in its object, as does the sexual instinct” (pp. 148–149). Freud remarked that the sexual abuse of children is more frequent among those who are in intimate contact with them (as, for example, schoolteachers), and he put forth the suggestion that those in whom the practice is exclusive may well be “insane” (p. 49). Socarides (1959) published a brief communication concentrating on only one facet of the problem, namely that the patient’s paedophilia served as a defensive manoeuvre against introjective and projective anxieties of early childhood, helping to eliminate anxiety, guilt, and pain.

Ferenczi (1933) described the psychic consequences of sexual molestation of children by their parents. He noted interferences with the child’s thinking and reality testing as well as with his autonomy and the formation of pathological defences. An identification with the sexual aggressor occurred, and the introjection of guilt by the child took place. Shengold (1974, 1979) describes “vertical splitting” in the victims and a “confusion and cloudiness that denote an alteration of consciousness affecting the feeling of identity and inhibiting thinking” (p. 112). Kramer (1983) has described the syndrome of “object-coercive doubting”, a pathological defensive response to maternal incest. The contributions of Ferenczi, Shengold, and Kramer are of importance to an understanding of the paedophiliac, as many paedophiliacs have themselves undergone childhood sexual abuse.

Most recently Juda (see chapter four) has described a case of a homosexual paedophile whose paedophilia “did not develop out a drive-based castration-related, id/ego/superego model, but, rather, from the need . . . to attach himself to mirroring and idealizable objects in order to prevent his fragile and destructive archaic selfobjects (parental images) from fragmenting his self and object structure”. The author concluded in this unusual presentation that “we can no longer assume that pedophilia is primarily or even usually an oedipally based, single-axis-oriented disorder”.

While many explanations can be given as to the causation of a paedophile perversion, specific forms of perversion must be seen in relation to other forms. A comprehensive classification must correlate, integrate, and group many factors in a logical fashion.

Theoretical considerations: a psychoanalytic classification and differentiating criteria

The perverse mechanism for the relief of unconscious conflict in these individuals exists at any level of libidinal fixation and ego development, from the most primitive to the more highly developed levels of organization. The underlying unconscious motivational drives are distinctly different, depending upon the level from which they arise. Oedipal paedophiliac activity arises from a phallic organization of development and must be differentiated from pre-oedipal paedophiliac perversion, which arises from preoedipal levels of development. We associate narcissistic neuroses and impulse disorders with the latter. The perverse symptom of paedophilia can operate at an anal level, especially when it represents a regression from genital oedipal-phase conflict. In the schizophrenic, the symptom may represent an archaic and primitive level of functioning, a frantic and chaotic attempt to construct object relations. There is a wide range of clinical forms of paedophiliac perverse behaviour, from those that derive from very archaic and primitive levels to those that are the product of more highly differentiated ones. Each individual case is hierarchically layered with dynamic mechanisms stemming from multiple points of fixation and regression. We can conclude that the clinical picture of the perverse paedophiliac activity itself does not necessarily correctly describe the origin of the particular mechanism responsible for it. This requires a study of the developmental stages through which the individual has passed, the level of fixation, the state of his object relations, and the status of his ego functions.

The classification itself has at its core the following concepts: (1) conscious and/or unconscious motivation; (2) the developmental stage from which the nuclear conflict arose; and (3) the degree of pathology of internalized object relations in the paedophiliac perverse patient. In the milder pre-oedipal type, the surface clinical picture of oedipal conflict may obscure the deeper and more important pre-oedipal ones, and regression does not involve severe impairment in object relations and other ego functions. In the more severe pre-oedipal type (Type II), pre-oedipal fixations are of prime importance, constantly dominating the psychic life of the individual in his search for identity and a cohesive self. Oedipal conflict and castration fear may defend against deeper fears, and pre-oedipal fantasies may defend against the emergence of oedipal material. There is always an interplay between the two.

It is my understanding that the true perversion is the preoedipal disorder and does not arise from oedipal conflict with a regression to earlier phases. Oedipal perversion is a different form of deviant sexual behaviour which occurs secondary to a temporary regression, does not represent a developmental arrest, and can be treated in the same way that we treat a neurosis (Schwartz, 1973).

In the clinical section that follows, I shall present two different types of paedophiliac perversion in patients who have undergone psychoanalytic treatment with me. The first patient, the case of Jenkins, is a pre-oedipal Type II sexual deviant whose fixation is in the practicing or differentiating phases of the separation– individuation process (Mahler, 1965, 1968, 1971, 1972); the second, the case of Randolph, whose fixation has been less damaging, occurred in all likelihood in the later phases of the separation– individuation process, the phase of rapprochement. Within the classification, I shall comment on differentiating criteria that separate, contrast, and clarify the two forms of clinical paedophilia. This grouping in an integrated fashion can reveal what can be expected in a well-conducted psychoanalysis of these patients: it can provide information as to the ultimate outcome regarding the removal of the perverse impulse, the establishment of heterosexual function, and the capacity of the individual to cathect a heterosexual love-object. Such a classification would shed light on the types of resistances to be met, describe transference manifestations, and connote the depth and frequency of regressive experiences and the capacity of the individual patient to use them therapeutically and recover from them. Within the classification we are able to define the basic nuclear conflict that will be affectively revived during therapy and the capacity of the individual ego to deal with it, specify the class of conflict to be met with (structural vs. object relations: Dorpat, 1976), and provide information as to the presence of areas of healthy-object relatedness which will serve as our therapeutic allies during the course of psychoanalysis. Further data collecting on other cases will undoubtedly lead to further clarification and refinement of the distinctly different paedophilias and thereby increase the efficacy of psychoanalytic treatment.

In my classification, it will be obvious that I rely heavily on the concepts of separation–individuation (Mahler, 1966), in the belief in a pre-oedipal fixation that is primary, and that I am in agreement with Greenacre’s (1971) comprehensive summing-up of her extensive clinical research on perversion. She suggested that

our more recent studies of early ego development would indicate that the fundamental disturbance is. . . that the defectively developed ego uses the pressure of the maturing libidinal phases for its own purposes in characteristic ways because of the extreme persistent narcissistic needs. . . . Probably in most perversions there is a prolongation of the introjective–projective stage in which there is incomplete separation of the “I” from the ”Other” and an oscillation between the two. This is in association with a more than usually strong capacity for primary identification. [pp. 48–49]

The pre-oedipal forms of paedophiliac perversion

The pre-oedipal form is due to a fixation to the pre-oedipal phase of development from age 6 months to 3 years. It is unconsciously motivated and arises from anxiety. Severe gender-defined self-identity disturbance is present: for example, in the paedophiliac male there is a faulty and weak masculine identity. This disturbance in gender-defined self-identity is never absent from any well-structured perversion and may only become apparent when the patient’s unconscious material is subjected to close analytic scrutiny. The persistence of the primary feminine identity is a consequence of the inability to traverse the separation–individuation phase and develop a separate and independent identity from the mother. Paedophiles of the pre-oedipal type are beset by anxieties of an incessant and intractable nature, leading to an overriding and almost continuous search for sexually perverse actions. There is a persistence of primitive and archaic mental mechanisms leading to an abundance of incorporative and projective anxieties. The anxiety that develops is due to fears of engulfment, ego dissolution, and loss of self and ego boundaries, self-fragmentation, and/or separation anxiety, “identity diffusion” (Erikson, 1950). The patients need the perverse acts to assure ego survival and transiently stabilize the sense of self. Consequently they must repeat the act frequently out of inner necessity to ward off intense anxiety.

The perverse symptom is ego-syntonic, as the nuclear conflicts—including fear of engulfment, loss of ego boundaries, disturbances of self-cohesion—have undergone a transformation through the mechanism of the repressive compromise, allowing the more acceptable part of the infantile sexuality to remain in consciousness via the Sachs mechanism (1923). Aggressive and destructive wishes towards the mother and a fear of her retaliation or incorporation by her, together with dreaded wishes and/or fears concerning merging with the mother, are warded off through substituting the body of a prepubertal child for the body of the mother. Aggressive and destructive urges are libidinized and lead to orgastic release, thus stabilizing the sense of self (Eissler, 1958; Lichtenstein, 1961; Socarides, 1985; Stolorow & Lachmann, 1980). Such a patient also achieves a “good” mother (father)–child relationship. There is a lessening of castration fear through identification with the partner and a warding-off of fears of disturbance in self-cohesion leading to death anxiety and severe hypochondriasis.

Subtypes of pre-oedipal paedophile perversions—pre-oedipal Type I and II—can be defined and differentiated by the degree of pathology of internalized object relations. The solution to this complex problem of separating the various types of pre-oedipal perversion has been facilitated by Kernberg’s important work (1975) defining criteria for understanding borderline conditions and pathological narcissism. In utilizing this approach, the meaning of oedipal perversion as well as pre-oedipal Types I and II are clarified as well.

In the milder pre-oedipal form (Type I), illustrated in the case history of Randolph (see clinical section of this chapter), while the pre-oedipal fixation is aetiological, the clinical picture may be largely one of oedipal-phase con...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• SERIES FOREWORD
• EDITORS & CONTRIBUTORS
• PREFACE
• Introduction
• CHAPTER ONE A psychoanalytic classification of the paedophilias: two clinical illustrations
• CHAPTER TWO Dogman: a prepsychotic paedophile
• CHAPTER THREE Juvenile paedophilia: the psychodynamics of an adolescent
• CHAPTER FOUR The usefulness of self psychology in understanding and treating a case of homosexual paedophilia
• CHAPTER FIVE Some comments on ritualized paedophilia and the sexual abuse of children
• CHAPTER SIX The consequences of child sexual abuse: a brief survey
• REFERENCES
• INDEX