a biology professor describing the body's need for nourishment, Rifkin explained that he needed the life-energy of these women - each his symbolic mother -- to survive emotionally, to fill the void and counter the pain that was always inside him. For this energy to nurture him, the women had to be dead first. If they remained alive, he reasoned, the energy would stay with them. In death, their life-energy would be released and absorbed into the body of their killer.

  Parke Dietz, the prosecution psychiatrist in Rifkin's only trial, testified that Joel's motive, pure and simple, was "sexual sadism." I submit however, that even if there were elements of sexual sadism in Joel's acts, this did not fully explain his complex motivation. In Civilization and its Discontents, Freud (1930) could well have been analyzing Joel Rifkin in writing about the death instinct as follows:

It is in sadism, where the death instinct twists the erotic aim in its own sense and yet at the same time fully satisfies the erotic urge, that we succeed in obtaining the clearest insight into its nature and its relation to Eros. . . . In this way [by destructive behavior] the instinct itself could be pressed into the service of Eros, in that the organism was destroying some other thing, whether animate or inanimate, instead of destroying its own self.
(Freud, 1930, p. 78)

  A great value in studying extreme cases, such as these adoptees who kill, is that they can demonstrate in pristine form, issues that may affect other adoptees, on a spectrum ranging from normal/minor to severe/extreme. "The importance to society of future research on this problem (adoptees who kill) is that only by acknowledging that it exists can we obtain the data and understanding to treat, and we may hope, to prevent further tragedies" (National Association of Homes for Children, 1986, p. 6).

REFERENCES

Bartholet, E. (1993) Family Bonds: Adoption and the Politics of Parenting. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.

Feigelman, W. (1986) Don't stigmatize the adopted (letter to the editor). The New York Times, March.

Freud, S. (1920) Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Standard Edition, 18: 3-64. London: Hogarth Press, 1955.

----------- (1930) Civilization and its Discontents. Standard Edition, 21: 57-145. London: Hogarth Press, 1961.

Grimm, S. (2002) Sealed records and adoption reform: an historical perspective. www.bastards.org/activism/reform.htm, March 31.

Kirk, D. (1964) Shared Fate. New York: Free Press.