SITUATIONS OF ABANDONMENT AND INTRUSION IN CRIMES OF LOVE AND DISAFFECTION

Abstract

Among relational crimes, ie serious violence (homicide, rape, arson) linked with a lasting
interpersonal conflict between the criminal and the victim, extra or intra-family crimes of
passion with loss of object are the most frequent. Their perpetrators usually suffer from personality disorders, even mood disorders or psychotic manifestations, but they maintain a pregenital, possessive, egoistic, quasi-fusional relation with their victims. It is the threat of a
break in this highly ambivalent and dependent narcissistic relationship that provokes the
acting out of the crime of passion, as the loss of the object leads to an unbearable emotional
distress with depressive ideation of a sometimes melancholic level (homicides-suicides). Most
often, the threat of the loss of the object of attachment is the result of a situation of affective
and/or domiciliary abandonment (fear of losing the partner, the children) but it is not
uncommon to find also a situation of intrusion into the personal or conjugal space (parent,
rival). Ultimately, situations of abandonment and intrusion appear to us to be the determining causes of homicides of love and disaffection in a conflictual relational context.