Psychopathia sexualis: With especial reference to contrary sexual instinct: A medico-legal studyKrafft-Ebing, R. von (Richard)
Science
Psychopathia sexualis: With especial reference to contrary sexual instinct: A medico-legal study
Krafft-Ebing, R. von (Richard)
Paraphilias
The cases in which the perpetrator injures and cuts up the corpse are
clearer. Such cases come next to those of lust-murder, in that, in these
individuals, cruelty, or at least an impulse to attack the female body,
is connected with lust. It is possible that a remnant of moral sense
deters from the cruel act on a living woman, and possibly the fancy
passes beyond lust-murder and rests on its result, the corpse. Here,
also, it is possible that the idea of defenselessness of the body plays
a _rôle_.
Case 23. Sergeant Bertrand, a man of delicate physical constitution
and of peculiar character; from childhood silent and inclined to
solitude.
The details of the health of his family are not satisfactorily known;
but the occurrence of mental diseases in his ancestry is ascertained.
It is said that while he was a child he was affected with destructive
impulses, which he himself could not explain. He would break whatever
was at hand. In early childhood, without teaching, he learned to
masturbate. At nine he began to feel inclinations toward persons of
the opposite sex. At thirteen the impulse to sexual intercourse became
powerfully awakened in him. He now masturbated excessively. When he
did this his fancy always created a room filled with women. He would
imagine that he carried out the sexual act with them, and then killed
them. Immediately thereafter he would think of them as corpses, and of
how he defiled them. Occasionally, in such situations, the thought of
carrying out a similar act with male corpses would come up, but it was
always attended with a feeling of disgust.
In time he felt the impulse to carry out such acts with actual
corpses. For want of human bodies, he obtained those of animals. He
would cut open the abdomen, tear out the entrails, and masturbate
during the act. He declares that in this way he experienced
inexpressible pleasure. In 1846 these bodies no longer satisfied him.
He now killed dogs, and proceeded with them as before. Toward the end
of 1846 he first felt the desire to make use of human bodies. At first
he had a horror of it. In 1847, being by accident in a grave-yard, he
ran across the grave of a newly-buried corpse. Then this impulse, with
headache and palpitation of the heart, became so powerful that,
although there were people near by, and he was in danger of detection,
he dug up the body. In the absence of a convenient instrument for
cutting it up, he satisfied himself by hacking it with a shovel.
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