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Cosimo Schinaia has filled a gap in psychoanalytic literature since Freud’s times. His definitions for notions of abuse have become established and have been entered in Battaglia’s Grande Dizionario della Lingua Italiana (2004 and 2009 supplements).
The first edition of Schinaia’s book was published in 2001: in the meantime, paedophilia has aroused a great deal of interest, also due to the transformations in its social dimension. On the one side, after a long concealment, it has begun to emerge within the catholic Church. On the other, with its unlimited offer of paedo-pornographic images, the World Wide Web has triggered the re-aggregation of internal eroticized instincts that were previously disorganized, which are very likely to be acted upon. Yet, therapy has been hesitant in providing a thorough approach to the paedophile’s psychopathology, its resistance due to the difficulty in overcoming disgust for similar behaviours. Schinaia believes instead that psychoanalysis is the “only device offering a way out from the polarization between blaming and acceptance that seems to limit and impoverish the debate on paedophilia nowadays.” The most promising therapeutic approach seems the one based on the distinction between different kinds of paedophilia, one which acknowledges their diverse phenomenology and clinical complexity. Paedophilic perversity is not to be confused with paedophilic perversion, or with incestuous sexual abuse (paedophiles who have children are in most cases non-abusing parents). This is the only way to really understand who a paedophile actually is, “what kind of feelings he has, what kind of emotions, what are the reasons for his behaviour.”

Cosimo Schinaia, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, is full member in charge of training of the Società Psicoanalitica Italiana and full member of the International Psychoanalytical Association. He directed the psychiatric hospital of Cogoleto and the national health system Mental Health Department in Genoa. Among his publications, Dal manicomio alla città. L’«altro» presepe di Cogoleto [From the mental hospital to the city. Cogoleto’s “other” crib] (1997), Il dentro e il fuori. Psicoanalisi e architettura [Inside/Outside. Psychoanalysis and architecture] (2014) and Interno esterno. Sguardi psicoanalitici su architettura e urbanistica [Inside/Outside. Psychoanalytic views on architecture and city planning] (2016).