Autassassinophilia

Autassassinophilia is a paraphilic interest in which sexual arousal is linked to the fantasy or scenario of being in danger of being killed: in its most literal form, of being murdered by one's own sexual partner. It is generally understood as an extreme variant within the masochistic spectrum and as the mirror counterpart of arousal centred on killing another person. This article documents the interest descriptively and for completeness, with no instructional content of any kind, and frames the topic around harm prevention throughout.

Definition & scope

The defining element is mortal jeopardy directed at the self, real or believed. That distinguishes it from ordinary masochistic interest in pain or helplessness, and from thrill-seeking in general, where the danger is not eroticised as a death threat. It also has to be separated from suicidal intent: the arousal, in Money's framing, is bound to the staging and the threat, not to a wish to die as such, although the two can shade into one another and the distinction is not always clean in practice.

Most of what is described under this heading never leaves the imagination. The English-language reference literature notes that many people with the interest are aroused by fantasies or simulations rather than by any real danger, which matters enormously when weighing risk.

Examples

What follows describes what the term denotes and what it does not. It contains no account of how anything is staged, and none would be appropriate.

What the term covers. Arousal bound to being in mortal danger oneself: overwhelmingly as fantasy, sometimes as simulation in which no real threat exists, and, in the few documented cases, as an arrangement in which the threat is genuine. The distinction between the first two and the third is the whole of the matter. Having the fantasy is neither a crime nor, by itself, a disorder. Arranging the real thing is different in kind, because it ends in a death, and a death is the one outcome nobody is left to consent to: what follows is homicide, and the survivor is prosecuted for it. The agreement at the start does not survive the ending it is agreement to.

What the term does not cover. It is not masochism, where what is eroticised is pain, helplessness or surrender rather than death, nor the negotiated edge play — breath play, knife play, fear play — in which risk is courted precisely so that everyone survives it. It is not erotophonophilia, its outward-facing mirror, where the arousal attaches to killing someone else. It is not symphorophilia, where a disaster or accident is watched rather than undergone. And it is not suicidality, though the two can shade into each other, which is why any drift toward genuine self-endangerment is a reason to seek help.

How the word is used. Only in sexology and forensic writing. John Money coined it in 1986 and no manual has adopted it since: it appears in neither the DSM-5-TR nor the ICD-11, and would be recorded, if at all, under other specified paraphilic disorder.

History & origins

Clinical lineage

The term was introduced by the American medical psychologist and sexologist John Money, who built much of the modern vocabulary of paraphilias around his concept of the "lovemap." Money introduced autassassinophilia in his 1986 book Lovemaps: Clinical Concepts of Sexual/Erotic Health and Pathology, Paraphilia, and Gender Transposition, for arousal contingent on the risk of being killed. He classed it among the sacrificial/expiatory paraphilias, one of the groupings into which he sorted his lovemap pathologies, and defined a matched reciprocal condition, erotophonophilia, or lust murder, which he described as arousal at:

stage-managing and carrying out the murder of an unsuspecting sexual partner. — John Money, as quoted by Mark D. Griffiths, Psychology Today (2014)

The pairing is why the two terms are almost always discussed together. Note also what the reference literature stresses: an interest of this kind does not require that a life actually be at risk, and many people with it are aroused by fantasy or simulation alone.

The interest has never had a diagnostic entry of its own. It falls outside the named paraphilic disorders, so in the modern nosology it would be captured only under the residual category other specified paraphilic disorder in the DSM-5-TR (American Psychiatric Association, 2022), and within the paraphilic-disorder grouping of the ICD-11, and then only where it causes distress, functional impairment, or risk of harm to self or others. As the general clinical literature on paraphilias stresses, an atypical interest is not by itself a disorder: the threshold is harm or distress.

Forensic & scholarly thread

Unlike better-studied paraphilias, autassassinophilia has almost no empirical base. What exists comes from forensic and philosophical scholarship rather than population research. The scholarly reference point is Lisa Downing's "On the limits of sexual ethics: the phenomenology of autassassinophilia" in Sexuality & Culture (2004), which took Money's "reciprocally chosen lust murder pact" as a test case for liberal consent theory and argued that being killed for pleasure breaks the assumptions on which ordinary consent reasoning rests.

Downing's case study is the one the term is now inseparable from: the killing of Sharon Lopatka in October 1996. Lopatka, a Maryland woman, corresponded by email with Robert Glass, travelled to North Carolina, and was tortured and strangled to death. Glass pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter. The case is cited in the clinical literature because the correspondence documented a sustained, articulated wish to be killed, and because the court's response showed how little weight prior agreement carries once a death has occurred. Beyond a small number of such cases, no reliable clinical natural history has been established.

In practice

Reported expressions run from purely imaginative fantasy, by far the most common form and the only one that carries no physical danger, through simulated scenarios in which no real threat exists, to high-risk staging in which a participant arranges to feel genuinely under threat of death. The clinical concern is straightforward: real lethal risk cannot be made safe. Any enactment that introduces an actual threat to life can end in catastrophic injury or death through miscalculation, equipment failure, or a partner who continues past what was intended. Responsible sources therefore emphasise harm reduction and professional support rather than any form of acting out, and this article deliberately omits methods.

Psychology

What causes it?

Nothing is established, and the honest answer is that the evidence is too thin to support a mechanism. The frameworks usually proposed connect the interest to masochism, specifically the eroticisation of helplessness, terror, and the total surrender of control, and to high sensation-seeking, where extreme physiological arousal amplifies sexual response. Money's own account treated it as a sacrificial or expiatory lovemap: a symbolic scenario of self-offering, often read by psychoanalytically inclined writers as guilt seeking punishment. It is also discussed alongside erotic asphyxiation, where the wish to brush against mortal danger is enacted directly on the body, and (through the Meiwes case and its literature) alongside anthropophagolagnia. The rarity of documented cases makes generalisation impossible, and every model here should be read as speculative.

Prevalence & culture

How common is autassassinophilia?

Effectively negligible, and no survey has ever put a number on it. It does not appear as a measurable category in the large general-population paraphilia studies, including Joyal & Carpentier (2017) and Joyal, Cossette & Lapierre (2015), which between them established that genuinely rare fantasies are a very small minority of the population. Its absence from those instruments is itself informative: the category was too rare to be worth measuring.

There is no organised community. Such visibility as the term has comes from catalogues of paraphilias such as the list of paraphilias, from the Lopatka case, and from true-crime and forensic writing. That is precisely why confidence in any prevalence estimate for this entry is low.

Safety, consent & law

This interest carries extreme risk and is documented here only with that framing. Scenarios involving a real threat to life can be lethal, and arrangements framed as fully consensual still expose participants to grave harm and a surviving partner to serious criminal liability. In most jurisdictions consent does not extend to grievous bodily harm or death, so a death arising from such an arrangement can be prosecuted as manslaughter or murder regardless of prior agreement: the Lopatka case is the standard illustration. Fantasy is not illegal, and having the fantasy is not in itself a disorder.

Where the fantasy edges toward self-endangerment or suicidal intent, the responsible route is harm prevention and qualified mental-health support. Anyone experiencing such urges, or thoughts of self-harm, is encouraged to contact a professional or a crisis service.