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This is a book on paedophilia. Though the author is a practising psychiatrist who has treated paedophilic patients, his approach in this book is through fiction and he has chosen a number of writers where paedophilic phantasies can be discerned in an attempt to throw light on the nature of the condition and its origins. This method has a number of well-known hazards, of which the author is well aware. If the literary work in question is not explicitly about paedophilia as a sexual perversion, is one justified in drawing conclusions from it and applying these to paedophilic patients? Certainly, drawing conclusions about the psychopathology of a dead artist from his works is notoriously unreliable—(Freud's speculations about Leonardo da Vinci do not carry the conviction of his clinical case-histories) and, while Morris Fraser does exercise some caution, he tends to use biographical and autobiographical material of the authors in support of a theory of the developmental origins of paedophilia. I think this is legitimate if it can be shown that both the developmental histories and the phantasies of overt paedophilia have common features and Morris Fraser suggests this but does not really demonstrate it. There is a notable absence of detailed case-studies, perhaps due to understandable problems of confidentiality.
On the other hand, the main body of the book, in which he traces recurrent themes or motifs in each of his chosen authors, is most stimulating. The writers that he concentrates on are James Barrie, Henry James, Lewis Carroll, Forrest Reid, George MacDonald, Charles Kingsley, F. W. Farrar and Hugh Walpole, but there are also references to Oscar Wilde, Nabokov, Thomas Mann and E. M. Forster. His thesis, briefly stated, is that the paedophile carries within him an image of a child which is really himself as he once was, with whom he is in love (the Narcissus theme), which gets projected on to real children. He accounts for this development by pointing to a common f