The Psychopathological Profile of Cannibalism: A Review of Five Cases

Abstract

In today's society, human cannibalism is extremely rare and represents an unthinkable act of violence. Scientific literature on the topic is sparse due to significant methodological problems, such as collecting enough data and generating unbiased analyses. The purpose of this article is to illustrate some psychodynamic aspects of cannibalism. After a review of the literature, we will present and compare five cannibalistic patients hospitalized in the Henri Colin secure unit (Villejuif, France). The patients described fall into two subgroups, suffering either from severe schizophrenia or from a mixed personality disorder with sadistic and psychopathic features associated with paraphilia. For the schizophrenia group, cannibalism is a self‐defense reaction to a perceived threat of destruction: survival depends on the annihilation or assimilation of the other. For the mixed personality disorder group, ego and narcissism are the central issue with a desire to overcome deep‐rooted frustrations by means of an extraordinary act.

Kin-Avoidance in Cannibalistic Homicide

“…This conclusion agrees with findings from two other large-scale studies on cannibalistic homicides ( Rajs et al, 1998 ; Lester et al, 2015 ). A diverging result with a large fraction of kin-cannibalism was only observed in one study with only five cases ( Raymond et al, 2019 ). We think these discrepancies reflect different sampling of cases, i.e., while our internet search sampled mostly cases by news coverage, Raymond et al (2019) focused on psychiatric patients.…”

“…A diverging result with a large fraction of kin-cannibalism was only observed in one study with only five cases ( Raymond et al, 2019 ). We think these discrepancies reflect different sampling of cases, i.e., while our internet search sampled mostly cases by news coverage, Raymond et al (2019) focused on psychiatric patients. Indeed, in our sample the cannibalistic offenders with the most obvious mental problems killed more kin ( Figure 6D ).…”

“…Altogether, we screened 19 such monographs. We consulted four scientific publications describing original cannibalistic homicide cases ( Rajs et al, 1998 ; Teixeira et al, 2012 ; Kapo et al, 2018 ; Raymond et al, 2019 ). We also obtained general literature (10 other books and papers) about cannibalistic homicides but did do so in a less systematic fashion.…”

“…They focused on the psychological background of offenders and provide deeper insight in the psychology of such crimes ( Lester et al, 2015 ). Another recent report ( Raymond et al, 2019 ) also focuses on the psychological profile of cannibalistic offenders. These authors also agree that non-ritual and non-survival cannibalism is often pathological.…”

“…We expected that cannibalistic homicides will have a different pattern from conventional homicides, with even less kin victims due to a biological repulsion and possibly pathogenic risk of eating kin. Until now, kin-cannibalism was examined in just one study on psychiatric patients with only five cases ( Raymond et al, 2019 ). We hypothesized that the psychiatric illness of these patients may cause them to not be representative of all cannibalistic homicides.…”