Emily’s Perversion

The image is portraying a female illustrating an attraction towards a dead body/corpse. Necrophilia is having a strong sexual attraction and eventually engaging in sexual intercourse with a corpse. Sigmund Freud, who is the foundation of psychoanalysis and every text we have read in class, would consider this illness as a perversion. Freud defines a perversion as any form of sexual behavior which deviates from the norm of heterosexual genital intercourse. This may include, but not limited to; homosexuality, bestiality (human/animal intercourse),etc. One of the texts read in this course is called “A Rose For Emily” in which the main character, Emily, shows signs of a perversion, a necrophilic perversion to be exact. She had a husband, whom she murdered because he was a homosexual (also another character with a perversion), and then proceeded to have intercourse with his corpse. This all comes together with Freud’s concept of perversions, which develop when a fixation, or something goes wrong in your psychosexual stages of development.