Some considerations arising from the treatment of a patient with necrophilic fantasies in late adolescence and young adulthood.

Some psychoanalytic theories relating to necrophilia are reviewed, supplemented by other relevant theoretical abstracts. A psychoanalytic case of a young man with necrophilic fantasies is described, emphasizing separation anxiety, sadism and anal masturbation, all compellingly manifest in the transference and rooted in infantile trauma. The material is compared with that of other analysts working with similar pathology, then discussed in relation to perversions generally. Finally, it is argued that if the prognosis depends on whether core fantasies are amenable to analysis in the transference, then there may be therapeutic justification for keeping adolescence open by blocking the developmental move forward, on the grounds that these fantasies would quickly be rendered inaccessible under the normal repressive processes of young adulthood.