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Johanna Rozenblum (clinical psychologist)
According to information from Le Parisien, a man in his forties was arrested on Monday in the 13th arrondissement of Paris for keeping the body of his mother who had been dead for several months. How does one come to commit such an act? Johanna Rozenblum, clinical psychologist, sheds some light on the matter.
The smell had been the first indicator. On Sunday, August 19, around 9 p.m., the police intervened in a building in the 13th arrondissement, alerted by a disgruntled resident. According to the resident, a foul smell had been coming from an apartment on the 7th floor since mid-June. The garbage chute, once suspected, was not the cause, so the neighbor ended up calling for help.
“She’s fine, she’s sleeping,” he said of his dead mother.
On site, the police officers logically knocked on the door of the apartment in question, in vain. The resident, a single man in his forties known to live alone with his mother, finally opened the door after a quarter of an hour, but did not want to let the officers in. When the police officers asked him where his mother was, he evaded the question. He ended up assuring them that she was fine.but she is sleeping” in a room.
Supported by the opinion of the magistrate on duty at the Public Prosecutor’s Office, the officers decided to enter the apartment anyway and discovered the horror. There, on a bed, the mother’s corpse was in an advanced state of decomposition.He lived with his mother’s rotting body” confirm the police.
The man was arrested and taken into custody on Monday, August 20. An autopsy should determine the exact circumstances of his death.
A pathological relationship with reality
As curious (and sordid) as this case may be, he is neither the first nor the last relative to hide the death of a parent at home. Sometimes driven by poverty, or the need to collect a pension, the act of keeping a “dead” person at home is regularly found in news stories. But in this specific case, psychologist Johanna Rozenblum, a member of our committee of experts, evokes another level of denial in the son.
“There is still a need to question the profile of this person. Being capable of such denial, to the point of keeping the deceased body of his mother and keeping it like a person who is resting evokes something of the order of dissociation quite severe. It is not his relationship with his mother that needs to be questioned, but his relationship with reality, his reality of the end of life, of death, of acceptance.”
In fact, only the study of a treatment, and of his medical history, could shed light here on his capacity to think about reality and to face it.“He was clearly a person who had a very pathological relationship with reality.”. A person who probably needs care, too.