Figure della pedofilia: nascita e metamorfosi di un tipo umano particolarmente mostruoso

The word pedophilia commonly denotes sexual abuse committed by an adult against a prepubescent minor. In our culture, pedophilia is addressed both by the judicial system, which legislates it as a crime, and by the medical and psychological field, which categorizes it as a psychiatric condition with various diagnostic criteria, etiology, and clinical aspects. Because it involves matters of justice and ethics and is the subject of these disciplines, it simultaneously assumes the roles of a “moral” and “scientific” genre. Is it then possible to study the pedophile, a “moral monster” par excellence, simultaneously as a sick and criminal individual, as a “human kind” that is, as a category characterized by dynamic interactions with individuals who find themselves classified through it. How has this categorization “shaped” individuals, and in what ways have they participated in the aforementioned categorical production? The essay will be structured into four paragraphs, each corresponding to various “figures” of pedophilia, through the analysis of which it will be possible to develop a historical ontology: the sexual criminal in the work of Tardieu; erotic pedophilia in Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis; the traumatic theory of psychoanalysis; the pedophilic sexual interest in the DSM-V.