A Strange Case of Gendercide: Fascination, Psychotic Features, Archaic Elements, and Phantasmatic Metamorphosis

This is a strange case of murder: a mafia pentito, an informer, reveals after ten years that the death of a man which had been considered natural, had in fact been a murder. The victim, a loan shark associated with crime people, was the companion of his lover at the time. The strange aspect is the way in which the mobster, with a couple of hired killers and helped by the woman, organised the murder: a shot of pesticide while the man was lying in bed with the woman. This modality was suggested by a veterinarian friend of the mobster who claimed that the pesticide would not be detected. The interviewer's imagination/vision of a metamorphosis while he was interviewing the woman in a forensic setting; the dream he had immediately after the interview; the bizarre construction of the crime; the seductive abilities of the woman linked to the choice and the type of partners she had and the bonds she had created; and the almost dreamlike description of the crime itself, suggest the emergence of primitive mechanisms of mental functioning: splitting, the use of massive projections of partial aspects and projective identification. A fragile and hidden common thread is hypothesised in this work. A common thread whose core is the desire for the narcissistic realisation of a woman who, in order to achieve it, puts eros at the service of thanatos. A red thread that connects all the different events, the real and the phantasmatic ones: from seeking a role as a woman of the criminal underworld to the magic fascination of an archaic Sicily, evoking primitive mechanisms of functioning typical of psychosis.