Four short stories by Edgar Allan Poe are studied. They are divided into two groups: the first involves necrophilia and the cadaver which remains psychically alive, as in Bernice and The Fall of the House of Usher; the second deals with reincarnation and pedophilia, as illustrated in Morella and Ligeia.

The author feels that Poe's idea of necrophilia is related to the need to find in the external world the cadaver or mummified object that has been introjected. In the final analysis, it would be a means to find again the dead mother as an object which could be easily controlled and manipulated. In the fantasy of reincarnation, the predominant element is an attempt to rescue the good object by union with a woman who is very much alive and can give a lot. In both cases the result is eminently the same—the presence of the cadaver. What the characters