Personality Disorders

• He discussed three severe personality disorders—necrophilia, malignant narcissism, and incestuous symbiosis
• “necrophilia” means love of death and usually refers to a sexual perversion in which a person desires sexual contact with a corpse.
• , Fromm (1964, 1973) used necrophilia in a more generalized sense to denote any attraction to death. Necro philia is an alternative character orientation to biophilia. People naturally love life, but when social conditions stunt biophilia, they may adopt a necrophilic orientation
• However, in its malignant form, narcissism impedes the perception of reality so that everything belonging to a narcissistic person is highly valued and everything belonging to another is devalued.
• Preoccupation with one’s body often leads to hypochondriasis, or an obsessive attention to one’s health
• Fromm (1964) also discussed moral hypochondriasis, or a preoccupation with guilt about previous transgressions. People who are fixated on themselves are likely to inter nalize experiences and to dwell on both physical health and moral virtues.
• Narcissistic people possess what Horney (see Chapter 6) called “neurotic claims.” They achieve security by holding on to the distorted belief that their extraordinary personal qualities give them superiority over everyone else.
• incestuous symbiosis, or an extreme dependence on the mother or mother surrogate.
• Incestuous symbiosis is an exaggerated form of the more common and more benign mother fixation