Necrophilia
As I reviewed in the prior installments of this series, I noticed a pattern emerge related to power differentials and a need for replacements for lost, or unattainable objects of desire. There’s a hype surrounding pathological love-objects that avoids any exploration of downsides and drawbacks; an ignoring or denial that is extreme.
In Grave Desire A Cultural History of Necrophilia by Steve Finbow, for a Necrophilic the act of Necrophilia is a “thing, tool, an object of love without any chance of reciprocation, without hope of propagation.” It’s a form of pleasure with the aim to avoid responsibility, negotiation, and obligation.
Types of Necrophilia
J. Reid Meloy, who interprets Rorschach images says that, “on testing, [Necrophile] Rorschach images are devoid of living human beings, measurably narcissistic, and convey a deep affectional hunger and sexual preoccupation.” He equates more benign necrophile desires to human desires for watching shows like True Blood, or enjoying fairytales like Sleeping Beauty.
Compared to other perversions or paraphilias, Necrophilia, Corpse-Love, is as rare as people think it is. Because of its rarity, there is little published on the subject. Anil Aggrawal’s Necrophilia Forensic and Medico-legal Aspects, is one of the few books on the subject that sheds light on the different subtypes and also motivations.
“Also known as necrophilism, necrolagnia, necrocoitus, necrochlesis, and thanatophilia, it may be seen by itself or in association with a number of other paraphilias, namely sadism, cannibalism, vampirism (the practice of drinking blood from a person or animal), necrophagia (eating the flesh of the dead), necropedophilia (sexual attraction to the corpses of children), and necrozoophilia (sexual attraction to the corpses of or killings of animals—also known as necrobestiality)…Necrophagia may represent a ‘hangover’ from our evolutionary past, where carrion eating [eating rotten animal flesh] was common.”
There are so many subtypes and strange rituals related to Necrophilia when these behaviors are discovered. Some examples include:
- Eating nail trimmings from a corpse.
- Eating genitals of dead male relatives.
- Necrosadism – assaults and mutilations of dead bodies, and sometimes involving sexual intercourse.
- Necromania – Keeping embalmed bodies for long periods of time, and sometimes involving sexual intercourse.
As expected, people involved in embalming, mortuary attendants, and gravediggers are more often found practicing necrophilia. If long travels were involved with dead bodies being transported for their last funeral rites, sailors were often implicated in necrophilia. Joseph Guislain made an association between old tales of Werewolves with possible ancient incidents of necrophilia. The book views Necrophiles as an anti-vampire in that it’s a living person that is interfering with the dead instead of the other way around.
One of the most historically documented necrophiles was Victor Ardisson who was alleged to have violated over 100 bodies. “He suffered from several other paraphilias besides necrophilia. He had a urine fetish during his younger years. He claimed to have enjoyed licking urine droplets from the toilet seats after his female classmates would use the facilities. He also insisted that episodic sexual encounters took place between him and his mother…Because he drank the blood of many corpses, he is often referred to as the Vampire of Muy. According to his own confessions, Victor regularly spoke to his cadaverous lovers, feeling genuine shock and hurt when they would not respond. Masters and Lea report that Ardisson used to suck the breasts of female cadavers he exhumed and also practiced cunnilingus on them…Once, when he was 28, the police raided his home after a tip from suspicious neighbors. They found the decaying remains of a 3-year-old girl whom Ardisson had used for oral sex. He had stolen her remains from a local graveyard sometime earlier. Until her corpse had putrefied to a dangerously contaminated state, Ardisson would perform oral sex on it with the hope that it would result in her resurrection…Ardisson also exhumed (and retained for many years) the head of a 13-year-old girl. This girl’s head served as his bedmate throughout his ownership of it, and was often referred to by him as ‘my little bride.’ He not only kissed the head from time to time, but also used it for oral sex. Von Krafft-Ebing described Ardisson as ‘feeble’ and ‘devoid of all moral sense.'” The attitude of bringing corpses back to life appears almost as if the necrophile would prefer the corpse to be alive and also want the perpetrator.
As nonsensical and unbelievable as this desire is, the description of necrophile Sergeant François Bertrand’s impulses, helps to shed light on the necrophilic daze. “Bertrand’s necrophilic impulses usually came with headache and palpitation of the heart. His necrophilic tendencies started unmistakably toward the end of 1846, when he first felt the desire to have sexual intercourse with human bodies…In 1847 and 1848, over the course of 2 weeks, the impulse, accompanied by violent headache, forced him to commit necrophilic intercourse about 15 times. He used to dig up the bodies with his bare hands. When he had obtained the body, he cut it up with a sword or pocket knife, tore out the entrails, and then masturbated. The sex of the bodies is said to have been a matter of indifference to him, though it was ascertained that he had dug up more female than male corpses. During these acts he declared himself to have been in an indescribable state of sexual excitement. After having cut them up, he reinterred the bodies.” When uncovering a body of a girl of 16, he said “I covered it with kisses and pressed it wildly to my heart. All that one could enjoy with a living woman is nothing in comparison with the pleasure I experienced. After I had enjoyed it for about a quarter of an hour, I cut the body up, as usual, and tore out the entrails. Then I buried the cadaver again.”
Necrolust – Mayhem: https://youtu.be/z0agoBcAF1c
Crypt of Thanatophilia – Tribulation: https://youtu.be/hsB8B3PFAGM
Killing Miranda – Burn Sinister: https://youtu.be/DxW-dinxOWU
Necropedophile – Cannibal Corpse: https://youtu.be/qWs33kWmSEw
Corpse Grindin Man – Harley Poe: https://youtu.be/o_hm_eMyyqM
Motivation
Since humans are animals too, studying animals can help to discover motivations. “Male cane toads (Bufo marinus) have been documented engaging in copulation with dead toads and even inanimate objects. Heterosexual necrophilia has been known in the drake mallard (Anas latyrhynchos). Kees Moeliker of the Rotterdam Natural History Museum, has described a curious case of homosexual necrophilia among drake mallards, in which a male drake engaged in copulation with a dead male drake for almost 75 minutes, with two short breaks in between.”
The theme keeps repeating here of a need to eliminate the fear of rejection by choosing targets with little to no power. “Sexual inadequacy may cause the necrophile to turn his attention to corpses. Some necrophiles are known to be impotent to live women—perhaps due to anxiety or some other deep-seated psychological disorder—but they are perfectly healthy otherwise. They are able to achieve erection and perform sexual intercourse with corpses because the fear or anxiety factor (to be able to perform or not) is not present. There is no one to chide them over their possible nonperformance. They are also able to masturbate and ejaculate. It is only in the presence of live women that they cannot perform…When asked why [a necrophilic] did not attempt something similar (touching breasts) with a live woman, he replied, ‘I’d be afraid. A live woman would not let me do it…Andrei Chikatilo suffered from chronic impotence, worsening his social awkwardness and self-hatred. In 1963, he married a woman to whom he was introduced by his younger sister. The couple had a son and daughter. Chikatilo later claimed that his marital sex life was minimal and that he would ejaculate on his wife and push the semen inside her vagina with his fingers.”
The problem with fear is how it compounds problems and prevents assertiveness to function properly, and this a repeated theme with necrophilia. Chronically negative relationship experiences create a desire for many types of replacements, and this includes the more rare necrophilia. “There are reports of some cases that would make one believe that harsh treatment, excessive criticism, and so on of the patient during childhood may play a part in the patient eventually turning into a necrophile…Klaf and Brown report the case of a 40-year-old black male necrophile who had a very harsh family environment. Everybody around him—except his mother—treated him very harshly. They were harsh and critical of him. The authors speculate that ultimately their patient found solace in the dead, who never complained and who were never critical. He found that a ‘dead person who loves will love forever and will never be weary of giving and receiving caresses.'”
This turning away from life towards death influenced Erich Fromm to make certain connections. “[He]…suggested a genetic basis of necrophilia. However, he also viewed necrophilia as a personality disorder. According to him, psychologically disturbed people are incapable of love and have failed to establish union with others. He discussed three severe personality disorders: necrophilia, malignant narcissism, and incestuous symbiosis…Necrophilic persons hate humanity. They are bullies, warmongers, and racists. They prefer night to day and prefer to operate in shadow and darkness. They love terror, torture, bloodshed, and destruction. In general they delight in destroying life. They love to discuss sickness, death, and burials and are fascinated by dirt, decay, corpses, and feces. Fromm stressed that all people may behave aggressively and destructively at times, but in the case of necrophiles, their entire lifestyle revolves around death, destruction, disease, and decay.”
An interesting chart from Fromm involves a gradation of opposites between: Necrophilia <-> Biophilia | Narcissism <-> Love of others | Incestuous symbiosis <-> Positive Freedom. It emphasizes what is healthy as a desire for higher levels of love, or Biophilia, and when those things are unavailable, there’s a possible turn towards something like a Freudian Death Drive. The necrophilic desire is for love without rejection, but rejection is a normal part of the world, and most people understand that rejection is a way to make people earn relationships. Earned relationships on both sides will always be more enjoyable. So this particular fear of rejection is much more distorted than what most people go through.
Björk – Mutual Core – Biophilia: https://youtu.be/-WnzRqCK6Fs
Björk – All Is Full Of Love: https://youtu.be/yDYMfm0JQOE
War Part 2: Beyond the Pleasure Principle: https://youtu.be/sU2cZriJZT0
Some of the other theories on motivation involve:
- An incredible desire for revenge against a dominating and bullying mother, or sisters.
- A desire to gain power to alleviate helplessness.
- To feel omnipotence by controlling people beyond their death.
- A need to humiliate women to alleviate inadequacy.
- A desire to gain pleasure from someone without the demand to give: Fear of the pressure for reciprocity.
- A replacement after undergoing constant rejection from live partners.
- Troubled childhoods involving childhood sexual abuse.
- Influences from parents to fear people in powerful positions.
- Loneliness.
- Witnessing violent fights with parents.
- Exposure to pornography.
- Substance abuse.
- Anti-social personality disorder (ASPD) diagnoses.
- Smell blindness that in normal circumstances would lead to healthy disgust.
The book provides general classifications to separate out people who only pretend to have sex with the dead from people who move beyond fantasy to reality. Different classes of necrophilia focus more on sex or mutilation. Other categories focus on the ability to have sex with both the living and the dead. Some are serial killers that prioritize killing and prefer to have sex with a warm freshly killed body. Others can go as far as possible until the body is rotten beyond recognition. There are also those in pathological bereavement who cannot let go of dead loved ones, and choose to have them embalmed and preserved for future interactions.
Since this is a dead partner, the term for the sexual activity is often called Frottage, which is unsolicited rubbing of genitals on a person or corpse. Since sexual excitement requires a certain amount of time, it makes sense that the perpetrator has access to corpses for long periods of time.
“Karen Greenlee, who worked in the funeral business, had an overwhelming desire for dead men in their twenties and thirties. One day in 1979, driving a hearse from Sacramento Memorial Lawn Mortuary to a nearby cemetery containing the coffin and body of John Mercure, a 33-year-old male, Greenlee made a detour, taking the corpse back to her house to act out her codeine-fueled sexual fantasies. After two days, the authorities tracked her down and arrested her. In the dead man’s coffin, police found a four-page note revealing her necro-erotic exploits with between 20 and 40 dead bodies. Remorseful, she questioned her motives, asking if her fear of love had turned into a love of death, calling herself a ‘morgue rat’…The corpses satisfied her sexual need not through penetration but by clitoral stimulation and frottage, while the attendant cold touch and embalming-fluid aroma of the dead body gratified the necromantic ritual of burial and the stimulant rush of taboo. She would arrive at night, use her keys to the funeral home, and spend hours riding the bodies cowgirl style, the dead men would have their own orgasm, spilling a little blood from their mouths. She would even attend the funerals, her gasps and cries erotic simulations of grief.”
Kissed (1996) VHS/DVD Trailer: https://youtu.be/x6TTBh64Yq8
Treatment
Treatments for something as rare as necrophilia are scant and limited to what is available for other types of sexual offenders. In a review (Brankley, Andrew & Goodwill, Alasdair & Abracen, Jeffrey, 2017) that looked at the effectiveness of treatments for sexual offenders, researchers found some improvement in recidivism, though far from complete cures. It focused on teaching patients how to regulate negative affect, promote enjoyable leisure activities, clear up distortions in human role expectations, taught how to detect appropriate partners, trained patients in conflict resolution, and provided social supports for loneliness. Essentially, it’s like working backwards from confident assertive examples of people who can date, accept rejection, regulate emotions, and to develop psychological supports for patients so they can gradually develop up the ladder to a healthy self-esteem.
Grave Desire A Cultural History of Necrophilia by Steve Finbow: Kindle: https://amzn.to/2WVYd2N Paperback: https://amzn.to/3hqqFU1
Necrophilia Forensic and Medico-legal Aspects by Anil Aggrawal: Kindle: https://amzn.to/3nXxyPf
Brankley, Andrew & Goodwill, Alasdair & Abracen, Jeffrey. (2017). Cognitive-behavioral approach for the treatment of necrophilia.
Morton, J (1990), The Unrepentant Necrophile, Apocalypse Culture, Feral House.
Photo:
A male Argentine Black and White Tegu (Salvator merianae) from an urban park in South-eastern Brazil mounts a female that has been dead for two days and attempts to mate (necrophilia). By Ivan Sazima – Sazima, Ivan (2015). “Corpse bride irresistible: a dead female tegu lizard (Salvator merianae) courted by males for two days at an urban park in South-eastern Brazil”. Herpetology Notes 8: 15–18., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=38578281
Psychology: https://psychreviews.org/category/psychology01/