ABSTRACT
Paedophilia is a term that has tended to be used only for the love of child or youth in its pathological sense—that is, for behaviour or experience where to speak of love is out of place, since there is not one whole person relating to another whole person. And yet the understanding of man gained from biologists, physiologists, and the theoretical and clinical work of analysts suggests that pathological phenomena rest upon normal drives and endowments. The sexual advances made to children generally take the form of genital exhibition, verbal approaches through the use of exciting or shocking sexualized words, caressing the child's genitals, or persuading the child to manipulate the genitals of the adult. An encounter with the parents' normal paedophilia is essential for achievement of this experience of selfhood; encounter with abnormal paedophilia can vitiate it totally and could lead to a perpetuation of deviation through successive generations.
