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In the last chapter I focused on envy of the maternal body and the importance of understanding this dynamic when working with individuals who pursue breast augmentation surgery. I now want to turn to another dynamic, namely the dread of the maternal body and its relevance in understanding necrophilic fantasies. Unlike Klein (1957), who stresses the envy provoked by the maternal body and its prized possessions, I am drawing here on Kristeva’s (1984) evocative depiction of the dread of the maternal body, and hence the fear of falling back into the mother’s body, specifying how it can be experienced as ‘horrific’.
Necrophilia is a perversion that is quite remote from the daily practice of analysts. Only those working in forensic settings typically encounter it. Necrophilic fantasies, however, are more common even if patients quite understandably struggle to admit to them. Such fantasies have been considered as the ‘neurotic equivalent of necrophilia’ (Calef and Weinshel, 1972), involving sexual excitement about women who look dead or immobilized in some way, such as a woman who is asleep. Whilst it is important to draw some distinctions between necrophilia per se and its fantasy derivatives, it is nevertheless important to keep in mind that the fantasy itself is perverse in so far as it negates the object’s separateness and is an expression of hostility towards it.
The connection between such fantasies and body image disturbances and other somatic presentations such as dermatological conditions has not been written about, but I have now observed it in three male patients with whom I have worked. Notwithstanding their different presenting complaints, these patients had in common disturbances experienced and/or enacted on the body and an early experience of a hypercathexis of the body-self by the mother whose investment in their bodies was felt to be excessive, resulting in a toxic mixture of idealization and denigration. In all three cases the patients manifested a dread