I'm hoping Dr. Klein's will explain more about his choice of the words "mythical" and "myth." As someone who visits this forum to learn from Dr. Klein because of his extensive knowledge and understanding of human sexuality, I am wondering now if "mythical" should be used to refer to all rarely occuring paraphilias. However, I suspect that Dr. Klein may have had in mind other possible meanings of the words "myth" or "mythical" rather than just the meaning of rarely occurring. Since he says specifically that the myth of necrophilia is more interesting than the paraphilia itself, I'm supposing that would be incorrect to just assume that this means that the belief ("myth") that necrophilia occurs frequently is more interesting than the paraphilia itself. This seems to me to be an incorrect assumption since it has not been been stated here (or elsewhere, so far as I know) that necrophilia is frequently occurring. I am fairly confident that if I am confuseed about just what is meant by "mythical," then other readers here are also. So it is possible that the "mythical" nature of necrophilia could mean not just that it is a "myth" that necrophilia occurs freqeuntly while the truth is that is occurs rarely. "Mythical" could also mean that even when necrophilia is alleged to occur (e.g., in cases of serial killers), it does not really occur or it is not really necrophilia, despite appearances to the contrary, but is instead some other kind of paraphilia. But if the "myth of necrophilia" refers only to the idea that the condition is much more rare than is alleged, I'm still left wondering where it has been alleged to be frequent. In my professional experience (which I certainly do not claim to be as comprehensive as Dr. Klein's in sexual matters), I have not heard statements to the effect that necrophilia occurs frequently. On the contrary, it is routinely referred to as rare, but this is the first time I have seen "mythical" used to refer to it. It is true in all of basic and applied science that rare events are no less interesting nor less important than frequently ocrruring events, and often rare events hold extremely important clues to understanding more frequent ones. So I am perplexed by the notion of a "mythical" aspect to necrophilia amd feel confident I am not alone in this perplexity. If anyone could shed light on this issue of the "mythical" nature of necrophilia, it would, I imagine, probably be illuminating to many other readers here as well as to me.
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