Generic discussion of paraphilic fantasies and violent offenders

Cho’s case 1s not the exception, but the rule: persistent fantasies, whether sexual, violent, or sexually violent, are often played out in real life. When people voice their fantasies, we should open our ears. When therapists, especially those influenced by the catharsis view of the mind, encourage their patients to engage in aggressive fantasies to release their pent up energy, we should bring forward malpractice suits as they are accomplices to crime. What kind of mind is most likely to rev up the fantasy world to supersonic levels and then unleash it in the service of excessive harm? Lust murderers — individuals with a craving for the bizarre and degenerate —provide one answer to this question. Lust murderers are typically repeat offenders or serial killers. The serial nature of their crimes comes from the fact that they are motivated by recurrent fantasies that create recurrent cravings. They are, effectively, addicted to violence. Their fantasies often entail some kind of paraphilia — an extreme and abnormal sexual arousal to objects, people or situations — played out through some form of sadism — a persistent pattern of sexual or non-sexual pleasure from humiliating, punishing and harming others. Here again we see the promiscuous human mind at work, seamlessly blending pleasure and violence, animate and inanimate attractions, sometimes with benign origins, but often with malignant outcomes. Thus, the pleasure derived from humiliation may develop out of the more common, normal and less harmful pleasure we experience from mockery and humor. Humiliation is just a small step away in a mind that derives joy from others’ demise. The paraphilias, like many of the other disorders that appear within the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Health, fall along a continuum from rather benign forms of voyeurism to erotophonophilia, the vicious and sadistic killing of an mnocent victim in order to achieve ultimate sexual satisfaction. Regardless of the particular object or situation driving the paraphilia, individuals become addicted. Like other addictions, including those associated with food, drugs, and alcohol, paraphilic addicts experience withdrawal. Dangerously for the world around them, the erotophonophilic or lust killer harbors sadistic paraphilias, including flagellation — the need to club, whip or beat someone — anthropophagy — the desire to eat human body parts — picquerism— a craving to stab someone or cut off their flesh, focusing especially on genitals and breasts — and necrosadism — a yearning to have sexual contact with the dead. Although these desires may seem unimaginable, they reveal one facet of the human mind’s potential — a potential that was fully realized in the mind of Jeffrey Dahmer who flagellated, cannibalized, dismembered, and engaged in necrophilia with his 17 victims. Such disordered minds are part of the human condition, one that stretches from individuals who never cache in on their fantasies to those who not only deliver, but develop — as in addictions to food and drugs —— deeper and deeper desires for harming others without the rewards that come from such harm. When wanting and Hauser Chapter 2. Runaway desire 78 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_012824