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 partner. It is generally understood as an extreme variant within the masochistic spectrum and is the mirror counterpart of arousal centred on threatening or killing another person. This article documents the interest descriptively and for completeness only; it contains no instructional content of any kind, and it frames the topic around harm prevention throughout.

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 coined autassassinophilia in his 1986 book Lovemaps: Clinical Concepts of Sexual/Erotic Health and Pathology, Paraphilia, and Gender Transposition, defining it as "a paraphilia of the sacrificial/expiatory type in which sexuoerotic arousal and facilitation or attainment of orgasm are responsive to, and contingent upon, being murdered or killed by one's own sexual partner." He placed it among the sacrificial/expiatory paraphilias, one of the six "strategies" into which he sorted the lovemap pathologies, and paired it with its reciprocal, erotophonophilia (lust murder), the arousal of "stage-managing and carrying out the murder of an unsuspecting sexual partner."

The interest has never had its own diagnostic entry. Because it falls outside the named paraphilic disorders, in the modern nosology it would be captured only under the residual category of 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 in itself a disorder; the threshold is harm or distress.

Forensic & scholarly thread

Unlike better-studied paraphilias, autassassinophilia has almost no dedicated empirical base. What documentation exists comes from forensic and philosophical scholarship rather than population research: for example, a discussion of the phenomenology of autassassinophilia in the journal Sexuality & Culture (2004), which examined the ethical limits of consenting to one's own potential killing. The interest is also discussed in the literature on sexual-asphyxia and consensual-killing deaths, where nominally agreed scenarios proved fatal. Because the recorded cases are exceptionally few, no reliable clinical natural history has been established.

In practice

Reported expressions range from purely imaginative fantasy, by far the most common and the only form that carries no physical danger, through to high-risk staged scenarios in which a participant arranges to feel genuinely under threat of death. The defining clinical concern is that real lethal risk cannot be rendered truly safe: any enactment that introduces an actual threat to life can result in catastrophic injury or death, whether by miscalculation, equipment failure, or a partner who proceeds beyond 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

Proposed explanatory frameworks connect the interest to masochism (the eroticisation of helplessness, terror and the surrender of ultimate control) and to high sensation-seeking, in which extreme arousal heightens sexual response. Money's own framing treated it as a "sacrificial/expiatory" lovemap, a symbolic scenario of self-offering. It is sometimes discussed alongside cases of erotic asphyxiation, where a desire to brush against mortal danger is enacted on the body. No single mechanism is established; the rarity of documented cases makes firm generalisation impossible, and the evidence base is best described as thin and largely speculative.

Prevalence & culture

Prevalence is effectively negligible in survey data: autassassinophilia does not appear as a measurable category in the large general-population paraphilia surveys such as Joyal & Carpentier (2017) or Joyal et al. (2015), which found that genuinely rare fantasies are a tiny minority. There is little organised community presence. What visibility the term has comes from catalogues of paraphilias such as the List of paraphilias and from forensic and true-crime writing rather than from broad cultural awareness, which is precisely why confidence in any prevalence estimate 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 even arrangements framed as fully consensual may 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 responsible framing is harm prevention and qualified mental-health support, particularly where the fantasy edges toward self-endangerment or suicidal intent. Anyone experiencing such urges, or thoughts of self-harm, is encouraged to seek professional help or a crisis service.