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The nature and significance of sexual delinquency can never be adequately appreciated without some knowledge both of the motives which prompt anti-social sexual behaviour and of the conditions under which the capacity of controlling impulse becomes compromised. According to
social criteria, sexual offences fall into two apparently unrelated groups: (1) offences involving an otherwise normal act of intercourse under antisocial conditions, and (2) offences involving a sexual act which is inherently 'perverse' in view either of its own nature or that of the sexual object. Nevertheless the social value of this distinction should not blind us to its unscientific character. Whereas it postulates an inherent correspondence between the sexual and the reproductive functions in 'normal' persons, Freud's early studies of hysteria showed that such a correspondence only emerges as the result of a long psychogenic process whereby numerous relatively unrelated sexual activities become modified, fused and integrated in such a way as to promote reproductive aims. When this psychogenic process is arrested, there results not only a persistence of infantile sexual tendencies which compromise the emergence of a mature sexual impulse, but also an infantile choice of sexual objects. The sexual objects of the child are necessarily incestuous; and he shows less discrimination between heterosexual and homosexual objects than is considered normal in the adult. Further, before the child becomes interested in his sexual objects as persons ('whole objects'), his interest is directed towards such of their bodily organs ('part objects') as are significant to him for purposes of gratification. Again, owing to the frustration which his sexual impulses inevitably encounter, his sexual objects also become the objects of his aggression. In the light of these facts sexual delinquency is found to be due to a failure of psycho-sexual development involving the persistence (1) of infantile sexual