Wisdom Notes on Psychology

Paedophiles and Child Killers

The links in the table on the left take you to sub-headings on this page.

The usual situation is that the person is often confused about his needs. In this case, because of his lack of self-awareness, the confusion can be very difficult to change. Therefore the person follows the social expectations of his parents and peers, interpreting their needs as his own needs. He may follow the expectation of others all his life, or until a crisis forces him to address his own real needs.

We can think of categorising needs in two ways.

• The Influences of Psychology and Existentialism

We can arrange them under the influences of psychology and existentialism. Psychological needs come under the sphere of validation, whilst existential needs come under the sphere of authenticity [¹].

• Labelling them as Transparent and Ambiguous Needs

Transparent needs are those that the person is aware of. Since he is aware of them, they can be changed or modified to some degree. When the person lacks sufficient self-awareness, then his needs are not clearly identified and so remain confused and ambiguous. The ambiguity in his needs can also mean that there are symbolic needs that he is trying to address.

Symbolic Needs

What are symbolic needs?  These represent unrecognised needs that focus either on a person’s subconscious feelings about himself, both as an adult and as a child, or on his feelings about other people. When he focuses on himself, his symbolic needs are existential ones, whereas when he focuses on other people, his symbolic needs are now psychological ones.

For example, consider the social restrictions on being true to oneself, as it plays out in sexuality issues. Overall, each person is a mixture of masculine and feminine needs. So each person can respond to both masculine and feminine influences. This view is not acceptable to mainstream societies, whether East or West. Hence the man can express his masculine needs but has to repress his feminine needs. The woman, especially in the West, can express both needs, though many societies still expect her to repress her masculine needs. The traditional recipe to balance this situation is marriage. However, the emotional side of marriage functions quite differently from the romantic beliefs that people have of marriage.

A man meets a woman and they are strongly attracted to each other sexually and psychologically. They chat and feel that they are compatible together. In this situation, what does compatibility really mean?  For the man, the woman symbolises his feminine needs, that is, the feminine side of himself; for the woman, the man symbolises her masculine needs, or the masculine side of herself. Hence the femininity of the woman symbolises the repressed femininity of the man. Similarly the husband symbolises the repressed masculinity of the woman. So when the man relates to his compatible wife, he is really relating to the repressed aspects of himself. Similarly the wife is really relating to the repressed aspects of herself.

So in a marriage or partnership where the partners are attracted to each other, the relationship fulfils symbolic needs as well as the obvious psychological needs for sex and companionship and parenting. The man satisfies his existential need to relate to his own femininity, and the woman satisfies her existential need to relate to her own masculinity.

When either or both partners no longer represent the repressed aspects of the other person, then the emotional factors of the marriage begins to fade and the partners begin to drift apart, perhaps remaining friends or else seeking a divorce.

Motivations

It is well established that many paedophiles retain their focus on children despite social ostracism. This indicates that some kind of bonding process is involved [²].

I consider the motivations of adult male paedophiles [³]. Assuming that a paedophile had a problematic relationship with one or both parents, then his masculine and feminine needs are likely to be a mixture of mature and immature, ambiguous needs. The immature needs represent his childhood confusion about sexuality.

The sexual mode of the child-orientated adult is whether he likes the sexuality of girls or boys [4]. If he had a problematic relationship with his mother, then he may like young girls, whereas if he had a problematic relationship with his father, then he may prefer young boys. Girls symbolise his childhood femininity and boys his childhood masculinity.

I consider the adult who prefers young girls. The child-orientated adult may hate kids or love them. If he loves them, then this indicates that he subconsciously loves his image of himself as a kid. Whereas if he hates them then he subconsciously hates himself for what he was like as a kid (in this case, his childhood was probably a time of heavy guilt for him).

When feminine feelings begin to arise in him, he has three choices. He can learn to control them and manage them so that he does not respond socially to them. Or he can accept them, or he can reject them. If he is receptive to feminine feelings then he may progress to becoming a “loving” paedophile. If he rejects them then he may become a hateful abuser to girls if the opportunity arises.

The dominance of either love or hate means that there are two kinds of sexual attraction to kids.  The two kinds reflect the difference between the two stages of bonding: identification and transference [5]. The factors of identification and transference can be changed by therapy, whilst imprinting can be highly resistant to change.

Identification focuses on what the person is, or wants to be, usually in terms of character. This is an existential phase of the average young male adult. Under the impulse of his emerging sexuality, he prefers sexy young females from perhaps teens to early 30s.

When he gets older, then the psychological stage of transference usually increases in importance and he explores who he is. Now his attraction may centre on complementary older females.

I present my view of the child-orientated adult who embraces paedophilia.  He reverses normal sexual bonding, under the influence of fear of adult relationships. So he reverses the influences of identification and transference.

a). Identification Phase

The paedophile who hates kids and hatefully abuses them is responding to identification. He has hateful memories of his childhood. If he was abused as a kid, it developed hatred in him. At some point, displacement of his feelings occurs: he subconsciously projects his intense guilt (mode of self-hatred) onto other kids [6]. He now despises kids. Kids remind him of what he was like as a kid, and so he hates the sexuality of kids. The gross abuse of kids allows him to temporarily exorcise his self-hatred. The kid is an existential symbol of his childhood. When he was a kid, he was vulnerable; now, as an adult, he seeks vulnerable kids. He does to the kid what was done to him, thereby attempting to get rid of the bad feelings about himself – a confused form of vicarious atonement.

He may even go further: he may have an existential need to kill off his childhood self-image. He responds to this need in a symbolic way, by killing kids. By killing the symbol of his childhood sexuality, he is symbolically killing the source of all his sorrows; by killing kids he tries to become more authentic.

Overall, as it grows up, a child needs tenderness shown to it, and also needs to express tenderness. If this is thwarted, then tenderness turns into cruelty and sadism. Cruelty arises when the person is unable to show tenderness in a positive way. Hence the joy that is often felt in exploring tenderness can change to the joy that is felt when exploring cruelty.

b). Transference Phase

The child-orientated adult who loves kids and takes time to groom them is responding to transference. He admires the sexuality of kids. He may have happy memories of his childhood. If he was abused as a kid, either it developed guilt in him or else he liked it. He has a psychological need to attain social validation through kids. The means of doing this is through regressive imprinting [7].

Killing Kids

If we want to understand why kids are deliberately targeted, we need to assess what the kids symbolise for the killer. There are three scenarios that influence the killer.

• His own self-image as a child ( hatred of himself ).

• His parental family unit ( hatred of a parent).

• His social environment, mainly school ( hatred of bullies).

The most intense trauma that a child can experience is that of rejection by a parent or significant adult. Rejection means the repudiation of what he is. It makes him inauthentic. He interprets it in an existential way to mean that he is something to be rejected. His self-image becomes pathetic. Once he has become an adult, the trauma will still be influential in his subconscious mind. If in an adult relationship he again experiences rejection, he will relive the intensity of the original trauma. He may even go “off the rails”, manifesting disturbing behaviour unless his moral code is strong enough to contain him.

When we look at adult killers of children, then a likely reason will be that the killer experienced rejection when he was a child. The killer’s coping mechanism is to project his feelings of rejection onto another child. Instead of him being something to be rejected, the other child becomes something to be rejected. The killer’s pathetic childhood self-image is projected onto the other child; that child becomes a scapegoat that he, the killer, needs.

Existential Symbolism

I go into more detail to explain existential symbolism. An existential state of mind is orientated to personal experience. It is how a person really feels about some personal aspect of himself that he is experiencing, in contrast to any psychological rationalisations or moralistic assumptions that he makes. When he lacks an understanding of psychology, he will subconsciously resort to symbolism.

The actions of perpetrators towards their stranger victims can be understood at an existential level. Considering a man to be the perpetrator, he is (as all men do) actually projecting his inner needs onto a suitable woman. This is a psychological tactic. His inner needs reflect both his subconscious feminine beauty (his femininity) and his subconscious feminine sexuality. These are existential states of mind.  Where rape is involved, the sexual component is more intense that the feminine beauty component.

Consider the rape of a stranger. A man rapes a woman. What is happening at the existential level in this situation? From an existential viewpoint, I consider that the man is actually targeting his own feminine sexuality. The woman symbolises his own subconscious feminine sexuality which he hates, and so he is really raping his symbolic projections of that feminine sexuality. Existentially, he is attempting to enhance his own masculinity by denigrating his own femininity.

Similarly, when a man murders a woman, his own subconscious sense of femininity is very negative and abhorrent to him. He attacks someone who symbolises his hated femininity. From an existential viewpoint he is really murdering his own feminine sexuality. His sense of his own masculinity is so low that he can only bolster it by murdering his own sense of femininity.

When a man rapes or murders a child, now he is relating subconsciously to his own feelings of his childhood. Subconsciously his view of himself as a child is so negative that he wants to punish or obliterate that view. What he does to a child is what he would subconsciously like to do to his feelings of himself in his childhood. Existentially he is attempting to punish or obliterate the negative sexual feelings of his childhood: by killing the kid, he is also temporarily killing, in a symbolic way, his childhood identity.

Andrei Chikatilo and Laurie Dann

To end this section, I give two brief examples of my ideas.  They are brief because when I studied serial killers in the late 1990s, there was very little psychological emphasis placed on understanding the motivations of serial killers and spree killers. So the books that I read contained very little mention of any facts that are relevant to a psycho-analysis.

c). Ukrainian serial child-killer, Andrei Chikatilo

Born in 1936, Chikatilo began his killing career when he was 42. In his youth, he was bullied by other kids. As a youth he was impotent, but found that by killing children and women he could achieve an ejaculation. Chikatilo was a mass murderer, with about half of his victims being children under 16, both boys and girls. The murder of children reflected his subconscious desire to murder his self-image of his childhood, or how he felt about himself when he was a child.

Chikatilo wanted to kill off his sense of childhood sexual identity. This was an existential need. He could not actually do this, so he chose to kill children – each child that he killed was a symbolic representation of his sexual loathing for his own childhood sexuality.

d). Laurie Dann

Laurie Dann was an American woman who shot and killed a boy, and wounded five other children, in an Illinois elementary school in 1988.

Laurie Dann was introverted and often self-absorbed. She did not get much emotional care and support from her parents. She suffered from parental neglect, rather than deliberate abuse. She did not have much in the way of interpersonal skills and so was clinging and possessive of each boyfriend she had. She was not good at handling criticism, often becoming angry or else resorting to lying in order to avoid it. And she did not like to be touched by other people – this indicates touch deprivation [8], in that she was not touched and cuddled and caressed enough by her parents, especially the mother.

After her marriage she felt very outclassed with the women she met from her husband’s side of the family, and felt that she did not fit in. Because she did not get much love from her parents, she found it hard to handle the love from her husband. Soon after the marriage her condition began to slowly deteriorate. She began resorting to obsessive-compulsive behaviour, something that first appeared in early childhood. She told a psychiatrist that she was troubled by bad thoughts and she used her superstitions to ward off those thoughts. During her short marriage, she orientated herself around her husband and ignored everything else and everyone else. She felt betrayed by him when he decided to have a divorce.

In the last year of her life she tried to pursue a career as a baby-sitter. This introduced her to families where the kids were cared for and adored by their mothers. It was a family situation that Laurie never experienced in her childhood. It was a situation that brought out her envy, since she stole food and clothing and damaged furniture in the homes she worked. The kids represented something that had been denied to Laurie – they represented validation.

When she decided on her final rampage, she choose kids to be her direct targets because they were existential symbols of the happiness that she had never attained. When she was going through her divorce, she once said to her husband “If I can’t have you, nobody else can”. The idea underlying the shooting of the school children was probably “If I couldn’t have a happy childhood, then neither will you”.

[¹]. See my articles in this book on Validation and Authenticity.
I have another article on Validation in my book Living in Times of Change. [1]

[²]. I have three articles on Bonding, beginning with Overview of Bonding, on my book Living in Times of Change. [2]

[³]. I separate paedophiles from child-orientated adults in the previous article Sexualised Child Attraction. [3]

[4]. See previous article Sexualised Child Attraction. [4]

[5]. For ideas on Identification, see my article Imprinting and Identification. See also the article Transference. [5]

[6]. Guilt is an emotion. I have three articles on Emotion on the Home page. [6]

[7]. Regressive imprinting is described in the previous article Sexualised Child Attraction. [7]

[8]. Touch deprivation is described in the article Parents and the Role of Death. [8]

Copyright © 2026 Ian Heath
All Rights Reserved

The copyright is mine, and the articles are free to use. They can be reproduced
anywhere, so long as the source is acknowledged.