ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the ups and downs of working group which is made up of psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, and psychoanalytically trained psychologists, who use various modalities in relating with paedophile patients: psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy carried out privately or institutionally, psychiatric examinations in mental health centres or in prisons, and psychiatric examinations for assessment purposes. The emotional and relational developments of this working group seemed to be closely linked with the specific subject we dealt with, with the fantasies related to it, and with the emotional ups and downs of our relationships with our paedophile patients. The analyst's obstinate and worried reference to the right to privacy, as a consequence also of the patient's possible reprisals, evoked the ambiguous secrecy in which the paedophile-child relationship unfolds. The differentiation between paedophilic perversion and paedophilic perversity has to do with diverse psychopathological pictures in which the transference, countertransference, relationship and relating group field must be weighed up and elaborated by absolutely different modalities.
