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In presenting a clinical study of a middle-aged man with an active pedophilia of twelve years duration, the author stresses the importance of early experiences in evoking excessive aggressive and libidinal impulses and in interfering with the normal progression of introjections and identifications. The perversion may arise as a defensive maneuver against the primitive modes of these processes that prevail into adult life and that are activated by need for love and fear of rejection and abandonment. Profound deprivation and maltreatment in early life and abandonment in the Oedipal period produced in the patient intense craving for love plus intense aggression toward his objects. The processes of introjection and identification did not produce the normal resolution of ambivalence. Instead, need for love set off impulses demanding the incorporation of the hated mother image, with resultant fear and rage. Through an idealized child with whom he could identify himself, as good child and as good parent, the patient accomplished an incorporation of a good mother and achieved a fusion with and control over the love object that obviated aggression. Before and during the sexual act he experienced a split in his ego that allowed him to deny his true identity. Simultaneously he carried out a splitting of his perverse object, admitting only those traits that conformed to his idealization of himself and of the good mother, and denying with anxious anger those traits that would remind him of the hateful, dreaded mother. The perversion was a prophylaxis against psychosis.