Necrophilia: A Study of the Psychoanalysis in the Characteristics of the Offenders Who Sexually Molest the Dead

Abstract

Deviance, then may be considered one of the facts of social life. Almost all people, one may be sure, can recall
some act of deviance from their own experience, they have committed either knowingly or unknowingly.
This paper deals chiefly with the psychoanalysis in the characteristics of one particularly macabre sexual
disorder – Necrophilia. Necrophilia, which is the erotic attraction to or obsessive fascination with death and
corpses8, as far as we know is the rarest of all the perversions, nevertheless it expresses succinctly a facet
of the perverse strategy that is common to all perversions. In its larger meaning this perversion is about
the deadening and dehumanization of otherwise humanly alive and therefore threateningly dangerous or
unpredictable desires. Especially alarming are those who murder to obtain a body for subsequent sexual
violation (e.g. Dennis Nilsen). Researchers dealing with this study on necrophilia have conducted their
investigations by psychoanalytic approach of the existing literature and an aggregation of data from the case
histories to draw generalizations of the typology of the characteristics of these necrophiliacs.