Clinical Theory and Skills EMIs
Michael Reilly, Bangaru Raju in Extended Matching Items for the MRCPsych Part 1, 2018
Exhibitionism.Fetishism.Frotteurism.Necrophilia.Paedophilia.Partialism.Polymorphously perverse.Public masturbation.Sadomasochism.Transvestism.Voyeurism.Zoophilia.
Acute Catathymic Homicides
Louis B. Schlesinger in Sexual Murder, 2021
Anal intercourse (revealed by the autopsy, which found semen in the rectum) was initially denied (because of embarrassment). AA later admitted to the act and said it occurred after the homicide. The victim, once dead, was no longer threatening to AA, a common dynamic in many cases of necrophilia. When she was lifeless, he was able to obtain an erection and penetrate her. Clearly, the victim’s taunting made him feel inadequate and angry, especially the victim’s comment, when he was unable to effect an erection, that he should go back to his mother. In addition, the victim’s aggressive approach was ego-threatening and rendered him confused and helpless by confronting him with his immaturity and inadequacy.
Disordered and offensive sexual behaviour
John C. Gunn, Pamela J. Taylor in Forensic Psychiatry, 2014
The term necrophilia is usually reserved for what might be called a corpse fetish, sexual arousal obtained from seeing, touching, and copulating with dead bodies, usually very recently dead bodies. It is much commoner in males and is usually an attraction to female bodies, although homosexual necrophilia does occur (Bartholomew et al., 1978, and the Nilsen case – Masters, 1985) and a female necrophiliac has been described (Rosman and Resnick, 1989).
Stigmatization of Paraphilias and Psychological Conditions Linked to Sexual Offending
Published in The Journal of Sex Research, 2021
Robert J B Lehmann, Alexander F. Schmidt, Sara Jahnke
Stigmatizing attitudes are often extensive and have been observed among people with mental disorders, disabilities, HIV, minority sexual orientations, or low income/socioeconomic status, among others (Hatzenbuehler et al., 2013). Yet, compared to other stigmatized attributes, paraphilic, that is, counter-normative or atypical sexual interests (Krueger & Kaplan, 2012), appear to evoke particularly strong negative reactions (e.g., Jahnke, 2018b; Russell & Piazza, 2015; Waldura et al., 2016). In fact, there is evidence that a significant proportion of the general public agrees to withhold not only friendship, but also basic human rights from people with pedophilia (i.e., a sexual interest in prepubescent children), even when they do not commit sexual (or other) offenses (Jahnke, 2018b). One explanation for the severe stigmatization of pedophilia might be that paraphilic interests are an empirically well-established risk factor for sexual reoffending (Mann et al., 2010) and might be an underlying risk factor for the onset of sexual offending in general (Seto, 2019). Much less is known about reactions to other psychological conditions, however, that are considered risk-factors for sexual offending or where corresponding sexual behavior not restricted to fantasies might be criminal. Among these are other paraphilic interests, such as sexual interests in physical suffering and humiliation of another person (sexual sadism), or sexual activities with non-human animals (zoophilia), or dead, lifeless bodies (necrophilia, McManus et al., 2013). Antisocial dispositions represent another prime (nonsexual) risk factor for sexual or any other form of offending (Seto, 2019).
Sex Addictions Faced With the Paradigm of Perversions
Published in Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 2023
Vincent Estellon
If certain figures of the perversions survive in psychiatric manuals, they emphasize the abusive aspect—as in the case of the pedophile, the necrophile, or the zoophile, who derive enjoyment from the dominant position they have over the other. The new divider separating the normal and the pathological seems to be located more around the issues of consent, domination, and control over a dehumanized other. Though it was long thought in psychoanalytic literature that perverse enjoyment tried to produce fear in the other, it can nevertheless be said that the axiom does not necessarily hold true for the three figures of perversion just mentioned. We come to think that the etymology of perversion is more resonant, as it translates the idea of upsetting, or leading someone astray, diverting him from his true nature, his own desires, in other words, subjecting a person to his own desire. The example of necrophilia, however, in the register of fetishization, calls attention to another threshold: Would the new boundary between normal and pathological be located at the border between life and death? While fetishizing the other consists of dehumanizing him in order to reduce him to a body or an image, another side of fetishization consists of attributing human and magical qualities to an inanimate object. The case reported by R. J. Stoller (1993) is striking: His female patient feels as though she is dead when a man is having sex with her, but she comes back to life when she has sex with a corpse (in a morgue). Then she feels alive and desirable. In this situation, arousal is maintained by the fact that the other does not desire me, but I use the other—his body or his attributes—to obtain sexual enjoyment. The corpse does not talk; it is a cold body that does not desire. For Stoller’s patient, living men are inhuman, while the corpse is at peace, asks nothing, and does no harm. In her value system, dead people are overestimated in relation to the living. People who buy Love Dolls (extremely well-made, life-sized silicon dolls) dress them, caress them, and penetrate them while the dolls’ waxen faces remain unmoved. Making corpses or dolls come to life, or treating a living human being like a thing: There is something of the living–dead erotic in perversion. Clinical experience often reveals that, under the so-called perverse symptomatology of the adult, there is the active turning around of the child’s submission to an adult. The child was treated like a doll or an infant under seductive control. In his adult sexual behavior, he treats the object the same way that he was once treated.
Related Knowledge Centers
- Black Death
- Cadaver
- Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
- Paraphilia
- Sexual Attraction
- Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
- Other Specified Paraphilic Disorder
- Fantasy
- Self-Esteem
- Reaction Formation
- Polymorphous Perversity