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Contemporary research on general homicide has shown that parricide rates are not affected by general rates of violent crime or the social structural variables (see Gilles; Green; Millaud, Auclair, and Meunier; Sadoff; Weisman and Sharma; but see Marleau and Webanck). The lack of variance in parricide rates across different periods suggests that traditional variables such as race and class are not causal factors in this crime. This fact, together with the stable rate of occurrence in both the United States and abroad suggests that the key causes of parricide are psychoanalytic, a factor that mainstream criminological research has often overlooked.
Parricide is similar to other “typical” homicide situations in that it resists boundaries of conventional definition: categorial identities such as “offender” and “victim” become murky. As homicidologists Richard and Carolyn Block state in their article “Homicide Syndromes and Vulnerability,” “the loser of the confrontation is the person who dies; the winner becomes the offender”(85). Thus researching homicide takes into consideration that the homicide event is the culminating point for a preceding series of actions by both participants. The event is deemed a “culmination” because that is where the interaction stops. Viewed in this light, fixed binary distinctions such as killer/victim are of questionable validity. The participants in the homicide event are dynamic, since the roles of the participants have shifted back and forth. In homicides, it is chance and/or (un)luck that stamps the final identity—through criminal law.
The sociologist Jack Katz understands homicides as assertions of morality and sensuous emotions. Put differently, those who kill do so to defend their version of the “universal good.” Thus when a husband “discovers” his wife with a mutual friend, the murder is an upholding of the killer's identity as a “good husband.” Or in robbery-homicides, when killers shoot innocent bystander-victims in col