A man of fifty with infantile features and marked oral trends visited funeral parlors, where he excited himself sexually by looking at female corpses, touching their breasts, and kissing their lips, and finally masturbating. The perversion started in his late thirties when he saw a dead aunt laid out in her casket. This was six years after the death of his foster mother whose dead body, particularly the breasts, first excited him. The author believes that this necrophilia was a reaction to the patient's melancholia after his foster mother's death which had reactivated feelings concerned with the original loss of his own mother. The necrophilia thus represented a mania. It enabled him to express his contempt and disparagement of the former loved object: the object was dead and could not retaliate. It also enabled him to satisfy his craving for new objects and his oral and anal instinctual needs. The perversion, like a manic reaction, served to help the patient to free himself from his objects rather than to succumb to their loss.