Sexual Murder - Justicia Forense

mother contributes to his crimes. This author argued that the futureoffender develops ambivalent feelings involving a hostile and sexualizedrelationship with his mother that is transferred to other women. “The commondenominator behind all enumerated factors leading to transfer ofhostility from mother to womanhood is believed to be the struggle with anattempt at rejection of repressed incestuous wishes. These wishes are stimulatedby maternal over-protection, seductiveness, and sexual promiscuity.This may be coupled with either father’s brutality, weakness, or unavailability.Outright maternal rejection may create a need to possess her” (p. 643).Meloy (2000) finds that an offender’s rage against his mother is a “productof a lack of differentiation from the mother when the perpetrator was a boy.Many social factors could contribute to this, including aggression, dominance,control, manipulation, or sexualization by the mother” (p. 14). Liebert(1985) believes that aggressive aspects of the early mother–sonrelationship are internalized and then projected onto a female victim.Brittain (1970) notes that the sadistic murderer often harbors “a deephatred for [his mother], not superficially obvious and not always acknowledgedeven to himself … [he] often tells of having, as a child, seen his motherundressed” (p. 202). Brittain described these men as having “a strong ambivalentrelationship to [their] mother[s], of loving her and hating her. He is… emotionally closely bound to her, bringing her gifts to a degree beyondthe ordinary. He is a ‘mother’s boy’ even when adult” (p. 202).The offender’s mother may be rejecting, punitive and hated, or she maybe overprotective, infantalizing, and seductive. Brittain (1970) providesinsight into the personalities of some mothers of offenders; he found themto be “pleasant, very motherly, kindly persons, distressed by the murder theson had committed but remaining devoted to him. Later, it is sometimesfound that when they come to visit [their sons], they bring books or magazines,and when these are examined they are found to deal with matters ofa sadistic, criminal or pornographic nature” (p. 202).Revitch and Schlesinger (1989) emphasized the image and behavior ofthe mother in the psychosexual development of adolescent males. Adolescentboys more than adolescent girls need to have a nonsexual view of theirmothers, and the notion that the mother might be sexually promiscuous canbe destabilizing for such youngsters. “For some reason, possibly cultural, aboy’s perception of his mother’s infidelity and sexual looseness is far moretraumatic than a girl’s perception of the same behavior in the father” (p. 108).In some cases incestuous feelings are markedly overt and are not displaced;here, the mother may become the victim. For example, Schlesinger(1999) reported the case of a 16-year-old who committed a sexual matricideincluding vaginal and anal necrophilia following about 8 years of mother–sonincest. Edmund Kemper (Strentz and Hassel, 1970) also had a disturbed