Figures of clandestinity. Notes on a clinical case of occasional paedophilia

Abstract

The author talks about the affective clandestinity of a paedophile patient within the analytic relationship. It can be either a patient’s communicative way of his childish world or the result of an unconscious perverse utilization of secrecy. It takes place when a condition that is polysemic, open, changing and potentially rich in meaning becomes a stable condition of splitting, that is to say, a kind of crypt or tomb. The clinical case presented points out the relationship between the continuous shifts of the patient’s figures of clandestinity and the analyst’s countertransferential continuous shifts between containment and refusal.