Definition
Adolescent or adult sexual interest, inclusive or exclusive, in (strictly speaking) prepubescent children.
Pedophilia, the erotic allure of the child declared psychologically discrete and contingently pathological, is an instance of the historical psycho-medicalization of sexuality that hails and confronts today’s psychologists in ways few paraphilias and mental disorders will. Writing and reading critically on the subject makes for an uncanny experience. All academic discourse on the subject is, before anything else, a symptom of the taboo that subject is made to address. Virtually all academic discourse is, in other words, already the taboo in action. Psychology, in this gravitational force-field of moral outrage, risks precisely encrypting the problems it claims to decrypt, in ways crying out for an anthropologist’s verdict on what delicate species of...
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Janssen, D.F. (2023). Pedophilia. In: Shackelford, T.K. (eds) Encyclopedia of Sexual Psychology and Behavior. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08956-5_112-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08956-5_112-1
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