NOTE: This is a teaser to our Feb. 1 issue: Taboo
Necrophilia, a term mostly used psychiatrically to describe a sexual attraction to corpses, is a highly misunderstood and rare disorder. The term necrophilia was not broadly used until Richard von Krafft-Ebing published his 1894 work Psychopathia Sexualis, which called necrophilia a “horrible manifestation of sadism.”
The misunderstanding continued through 1941 when Abraham A. Brill stated that necrophiliacs were psychotic, mentally deficient, and incapable of finding a consenting partner. Throughout history, the disorder has been associated with cannibalism and vampirism, among other things … but what really classifies as necrophilia and how does it interact with today’s society?
Necrophilia has been around for several millennia, the earliest evidence dating back to the ancient Egyptians. They reportedly attempted to prevent necrophilia by refusing to send women’s bodies to the embalmers. King Herod the Great is rumored to have coated his second wife in honey in order to have his way with her for the seven years following her death. Achilles had intercourse with the Amazonian queen Penthesilea after he murdered her.
Even Charlemagne is rumored to have committed necrophilic acts. As for more pop-culture cases, the classic Sleeping Beauty and Romeo and Juliet have necrophilic undertones in their emphasis on bringing a corpse back to life.
More recently, Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, and Ed Gein, the inspiration for Psycho’s Norman Bates, all engaged in necrophilic acts during their killing sprees. So even though the term necrophilia has only been used commonly for a little over a century, the actual disorder has been around throughout most of our history.
What exactly classifies as necrophilia? Jonathan Rosman and Phillip Resnick conducted a study and published their findings in 1989 to help answer this question. They separated necrophilia into two broad categories: true necrophiliacs and pseudonecrophiliacs.
Pseudonecrophiliacs often have a transient attraction to corpses but the corpse is not the actual object of their attraction. True necrophiliacs, however, are further broken down into three groups: homicidal necrophiliacs, “regular” necrophiliacs, and fantasy necrophiliacs.
Homicidal necrophiliacs are fully capable and willing to murder in order to gain access to a corpse to satisfy their desires. “Regular” necrophiliacs satisfy their attractions using an already dead corpse; they don’t murder to get there. Lastly, fantasy necrophiliacs only fantasize about corpses; they do not commit any actual acts.
Rosman and Resnick stated that necrophiliacs are not commonly associated with psychosis, sadism, or mental retardation, as was formerly believed. However, they did determine that a necrophile, often male, usually develops low self-esteem, maybe even due to a significant loss, and is likely to fear rejection to the point of desiring a partner that cannot reject him. Or, the necrophiliac might take a different path. He might have been extremely fearful of the dead and by using reaction formation to get over that, accidentally developed an attraction to the former fear.
Those are just hypotheses, though; no therapist has treated enough necrophiliacs so no research on effective treatments exist. The disorder was given its own section in the most recent edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, officially classifying it as a mental disorder.
New Delhi professor Anil Aggrawal took a different approach than Rosman and Resnick in his 2009 book Necrophilia, Forensic and Medico-legal Aspects, which remains the most in-depth study published on the subject. Aggrawal determines that, like many other things, necrophilia is a spectrum, from Class I (roleplay) through Class IX, homicidal necrophilia. He states that most necrophiliacs advance along this spectrum through time, often reaching the later necrophilic acts.
Necrophilia is legal in three states as of 2015: Kansas, Louisiana, and Massachusetts.
It was outlawed in California in 2004, and Nevada has a hefty maximum punishment available to anyone convicted. Even if most states do not explicitly outlaw necrophilia, they often try suspects under a charge of sexual assault because the corpse did not give consent.
Necrophilia is perhaps one of the greatest misunderstood disorders of our time, without any significant research due to lack of successful treatments. However, in the barest definition of the word, it is simply an attraction to corpses, with people sitting on a spectrum with how far they take it.
