What is the Meaning & Definition of Necromania

The term necromania consists of necro words, which means death (as the word necropolis or necrophilia) and mania, which means disorder or dementia, such as mitomania Pyromania. Thus, the necromania is the trend and the love towards everything related to the death. Like all fads, the necromania can occur at different levels. You could speak of a reasonable fondness towards death. In fact, there are people interested in the aesthetics of the cemeteries, the obituaries or the epitaphs. Even some literary currents have expressed their interest towards death, as happened in the romantic literature, in which the poets addressed issues associated with the death or read poems over the tombs.
On the other hand, if the inclination towards the death occurs in a high degree, already are could talk about disorder, an obsession. It is what happens when someone is fond of rituals related to death, likes to dig up human remains, see corpses and even has a sexual attraction to the dead, also known as necrophilia.

A psychiatric explanation

In its morbid, the necromania is a paraphilia, i.e. who have this disorder is excited with the idea of death and everything to do with it. This type of obsession has a close relationship with the sexual deviations. Psychiatrists use the morbid term to refer to these behaviors (morbid implies disease in some sense). Any pathological mania can be accompanied by a series of symptoms: euphoric mood, provocative behaviour, denial of the problem, irritability and a considerable alteration of the own esteem. These symptoms can lead to psychotic behavior, delusions and other mental disorders.

A psychoanalytic explanation

Freud mused about the unconscious, libido and drives. In his psychoanalytic approach mentioned two energy forces: eros and the Thanatos. Eros would be the impetus for life and would be dominated by the pleasure principle, while the Thanatos is just the opposite. The Thanatos is the unstoppable momentum towards destruction and, thus, to the death. In this way, the necromania could be explained from the perspective of psychoanalysis. For Freud, the fondness for death would be a symptom of a destructive mentality, a childhood trauma or a destructive libido.
The Freudian view can be very useful to understand the necromania, because we must not forget that by the macabre attraction, exists in some people something which is reflected in some popular traditions and art itself.