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We have attempted to delineate the principal features of the necrophilic fantasy and the equivalents and derivatives of such a fantasy. We have emphasized the pivotal role of the wish to return into the maternal body and to explore its interior. We have similarly stressed the relationship to the wish to remove—and replace—an intrauterine rival as well as the wish to replace via identification the paternal phallus (the latter, we feel, is especially significant as a consequence of primal scene experience and traumata). We have also pointed to the very crucial role which scoptophilic impulses play in the elaboration of such fantasies. We have attempted to demonstrate the manner in which such fantasies may play a significant part in the structure and content of a variety of clinical situations. Finally, we should make more explicit what we have tried to keep, at least, implicit throughout the body of this essay: we are not suggesting that any of these clinical entities is dependent directly or completely only on the necrophilic element; nor are any of the constituent elements which we have described limited in its effect and impact only to the necrophilia. Any one fantasy, let alone a complex piece of manifest behaviour, must represent the final common confluence of a large number of interacting determinants; and each of these determinants, in turn, can find quite different means of expression. We have tried to show how certain impulses, certain experiences and certain defensive configurations can come together and contribute to a specific fantasy and specific forms of behaviour.