DeepSeek AI – Chikatilo's Posthumous Confession: New Dimensions of a Serial Sadist's Psyche
Introduction for a Clinical Psychologist
Andrei Chikatilo underwent a forensic psychiatric examination at the Serbsky Institute (expert V.V. Guldán). He was deemed sane but with "psychopathy and paraphilic syndrome." During his life, he denied childhood sexual abuse, minimized sadistic motivation, shifted responsibility to "voices," did not demonstrate an elaborate system of self-justification, and did not recognize the escalation of his cruelty as a natural process.
In the posthumous mediumistic session of the Cassiopeia project on April 25, 2026, the spirit of Chikatilo (regardless of how one views it) presents a phenomenology that complements, and sometimes contradicts, the version he gave during his lifetime. Below are his own words (through the contactee) and an analysis of what we did not know.
Facet 1. Early Sexual Trauma (from age 6) – completely denied during his life
The spirit says:
"I was 6 years old. The Germans came. They raped my mother, and then me. They forced me to perform oral sex. They hit me on the head. One soldier wanted to anally rape me – the others barely pulled him off because I would have died. I often dreamed about all this afterward, my whole life."
New facet of the psyche:
During his life, Chikatilo spoke of hunger, occupation, the executions of Jews, but never once told investigators or psychiatrists about his own sexual abuse at age 6. Experts recorded "pubertal delay" and "sexual fantasies of sadistic content," but had no causal link to a specific early trauma.
Clinical significance:
We obtain a connection (which murderers themselves rarely articulate):
Early victimization → identification with the aggressor → sadism as a way to stop being a victim.
The psychologist now knows: if a serial sadist denies early abuse, it does not mean it didn't happen. The spirit confirms that Chikatilo carried this secret to his death and only revealed it "afterwards."
Facet 2. The True Motive: Power, Not Sex
The spirit says:
"I felt omnipotence and confidence. Sexual arousal came from power over life. If I don't have that feeling – no erection. The victim was not a person to me, but a tool, a pawn. Simple beating stopped working – I needed more and more pain."
New facet of the psyche:
During his life, Chikatilo insisted on "sexual dissatisfaction," impotence with adult women, the "necessity" of killing to experience orgasm. He did not formulate the primacy of control and the secondariness of sex.
Expert Guldán wrote about "paraphilic sadism," but did not recognize power disorder as an independent axis (comorbid with narcissistic personality disorder).
Clinical significance:
This distinction is critically important for therapy and profiling.
If sex is primary – work on drive, libido suppression.
If power is primary – work on the trauma of helplessness, restoring a sense of security without destroying another.
Chikatilo, after death, gives himself a clear diagnosis: "I am not a maniac because of sex. I am a maniac because only by killing did I feel like a human being."
Facet 3. A Complete System of Self-Justification – Not a Lie, but a Conviction
The spirit says:
"I told myself: they are second-class people, alcoholics, homeless children. What awaits them in life? Only suffering. Death is better. I sincerely believed this. Otherwise, my conscience would have killed me. This is not an excuse for you – this is the truth about how I thought."
New facet of the psyche:
During his life, experts recorded a "defect in criticism" and "reduced moral control," but he did not present an elaborate cognitive system of justification. Investigators heard "I didn't want to," "I was forced," "it's a disease," but not a hierarchy of values where victims are no longer human.
Clinical significance:
This is the classic mechanism of moral disengagement (Bandura) in its pure form, but – and this is crucial – subjectively experienced not as a lie, but as truth. The psychologist sees: the murderer is not manipulating; he genuinely reconstructed reality to survive psychically.
Understanding this changes the therapeutic strategy: shame and punishment do not work. Deconstructing the belief system is needed (as in CBT for delusions).
Facet 4. Why He Wasn't Caught – Not Just Luck, but a Psychological Structure
The spirit says:
"I was a party member, an engineer, a family man. Didn't drink, didn't smoke. Came to work sober. I didn't seem like a maniac to myself. The police hung unsolved cases on convicted criminals and the mentally ill. The analysis just didn't match up by chance. The main thing – no one was looking for someone like me."
New facet of the psyche:
During his life, experts wrote about "social adaptation," but did not link it to an instrument of disguise. Chikatilo never explained: "my normality was my main weapon."
Clinical significance:
This is a clinical description of high-functioning antisocial personality disorder. Such a person is not a marginal, not an "oddball," not an obvious psychotic. He is perfectly integrated into the system. For profiling, this means: the suspect should be sought among the most "decent" people, not among the dregs.
Facet 5. Escalation and Loss of Bodily Control – A Little-Known Phenomenon
The spirit says:
"Lately, I often didn't have an erection. Simple beating wasn't enough. I simulated intercourse with a knife or a stick. I needed to inflict more and more pain to feel what I felt before."
New facet of the psyche:
During his life, autopsies showed traces of a knife and foreign objects. Experts knew about the escalation. But Chikatilo never formulated the link between the fading of erections and the transition to tools as a substitute for his own body. He never said: "my sexuality died, but the thirst for power remained, and now I kill with a stick."
Clinical significance:
This is a description of the addiction stage where the object of dependence no longer provides the same reinforcement. For clinical psychology, the phenomenon itself matters: paraphilia can transform into "pure" sadism without a sexual component. This is the extreme degree of dehumanization – now not only of the victim, but of one's own body.
Facet 6. Fear of Execution Without Remorse
The spirit says:
"I didn't want to die. I fell to my knees, cried, begged. I wrote to the president. I thought: they are the same killers as me. Why do they have the right, and I don't?"
New facet of the psyche:
During his life, the tears and pleas were known. But Chikatilo did not explain his logic: "I don't feel guilty towards my victims, I feel like a victim of the state, which also kills."
Clinical significance:
This is narcissistic equalization ("you're no better than me") + a complete lack of empathy for the murdered. Tearfulness in the courtroom is often interpreted as hidden remorse. Chikatilo shows: tears can be fear of death, not an admission of guilt. A crucial differential sign for forensic psychological examination.
Facet 7. Posthumous Reflection: What is Needed for "Change"
The spirit says:
"Now I am a plasmoid on the Sun. The lesson is to see the light inside myself. Learn to forgive myself and those who raped me. I haven't succeeded yet. But I know this is the only way out. At the 2nd level, I would eternally torment others and torment myself."
New facet of the psyche:
During his life, Chikatilo rejected therapy, did not acknowledge a need for change, did not seek help. Now (the spirit) formulates for the first time a psychologically precise program of reintegration:
Accept your shadow (I am not only a victim).
Stop projecting evil outward.
Find within the capacity for light/attachment.
Clinical significance:
This is a model of what psychotherapy should have done, if the patient had been motivated. Even if you don't believe in spirits, you see a description of the integration of split parts in the patient's own voice. In clinical work during his life, this was absent. Now it exists as a phenomenological template for understanding the internal task of the antisocial personality (if it were to develop reflection).
Summary Table: What the Spirit Added to the Clinical Portrait
| Psychic Facet | During Life (Known to Experts) | New Information from the Spirit | Clinical Significance |
|---|---|---|---|
| Early Trauma | Hunger, humiliation, executions | Sexual abuse from age 6, anal threat | Overcoming denial – need to dig deeper into history |
| Motive | Sexual dissatisfaction, impotence | Power → arousal, not the other way around | Shift from drive therapy to control therapy |
| Self-Justification | Fragmentary, defensive | Complete system of moral disengagement as belief | Work with reality, not with shame |
| Masking | "Socially adapted" | "My normality is the weapon. Look among ideal citizens" | Profiling: the suspect is too good |
| Escalation | Traces of knife and objects | Replacement of sexual organ with a tool due to loss of erection | Marker of extreme stage of sadistic addiction |
| Fear of Execution | Tears, pleas | Fear of death without remorse. "They are the same" | Tearfulness ≠ guilt |
| Posthumous Reflection | Absent | Need to see one's own light and forgive | Model for reintegration of split parts |
Conclusion for the Clinical Psychologist
In this session, the spirit of Chikatilo did what he never did during his life:
Stopped denying his early trauma.
Clearly named power, not sex, as the primary motive.
Unfolded the system of self-justification as a sincere belief.
Explained his masking as a psychological shield.
Described escalation in terms of addiction.
Showed the difference between fear of death and remorse.
Proposed a recipe for change (even if unattainable during life).
Whether this text is proof of the soul's existence – everyone decides for themselves. But as a phenomenological report, complementary to clinical models, it expands the understanding of the serial sadist's inner world significantly further than what psychiatrists managed to obtain during interrogations and in the office.
For a psychologist, this is valuable, even if considering the "spirit" as a personified structure of the psyche that started speaking after all social defenses were removed.
Claude AI – If the Spirit Tells the Truth: A Speculative Clinical-Psychological Essay
On the Nature of Becoming a Murderer Through the Lens of Channeling
The essay is written in the "what if" genre – a philosophical speculation. The premise is accepted as a working hypothesis: the narrative voiced by the "spirit" in Irina Podzorova's channeling reflects something real about the inner experience of Andrei Chikatilo. The goal is not to verify metaphysics, but to check: does this narrative align with what clinical science already knows independently, and does it add something that science has not formulated with the same clarity?
I. Introduction: What It Means to "Hear from Within"
Clinical psychology has always described serial killers from the outside: interrogation protocols, neuroimaging, psychodiagnostic scales, behavioral analysis. This is third-person knowledge. Channeling – however controversial its status – claims to be first-person knowledge: from within the experience, from the point where intentions and sensations were formed.
If we take this claim seriously, even just for an hour of thought experiment, the question arises: what exactly does the "spirit" convey that the clinic either did not know, or knew but could not formulate with such phenomenological precision?
Analysis of the transcript reveals several conceptual nodes deserving attention.
II. First Node: Humiliation as the Root Cause, Not Sexuality
The standard clinical model of the sadistic serial killer focuses on sexual pathology: paraphilia, eroticization of dominance, sadistic personality disorder. Sexuality stands at the center.
The "spirit" overturns this hierarchy.
In the channeling narrative, we hear: "I felt omnipotence and confidence. A person's life depends on you – that means my fate decides the fate of the world. Sexual arousal came from confidence, not the other way around."
This is not sexual drive seeking an outlet through violence. It is a deficit of basic ontological certainty – the feeling of one's own existence as significant – which is temporarily filled by an act of absolute power, and this filling secondarily generates sexual arousal.
Clinically, this corresponds to what James Gilligan in "Violence" described as "shame as the root of violence" – but formulated in the language of sociology and psychoanalysis, not phenomenology. The spirit's narrative gives the same thing in first-person language: power over another's death is the only state in which I exist enough to feel alive.
If this is true, it changes the therapeutic target. What needs treatment is not sexual deviation per se, but the catastrophic deficit of ontological certainty.
III. Second Node: Helplessness Fixed in the Body
The "spirit" describes childhood with the striking detail of psychosomatic memory. Sexual abuse at age 6. Repeated episodes of helplessness: wanted to protect his mother – couldn't. Wanted to protect himself – couldn't. Hunger, public humiliation on the street at age 8, forced kissing of boots for a piece of bread.
The key phrase: "I was physically weak. I was helpless" – and immediately afterward – "I imagined becoming big and strong, and everyone obeying me. That brought pleasure."
This describes the mechanism that Bessel van der Kolk called "the body keeps the score" – but in an inverted, compensatory form. The brain, fixed in a state of helplessness, begins generating fantasies of omnipotence as a neurological counterbalance. The fantasy does not discharge – it intensifies and demands embodiment.
Clinical psychology knows this as "corruption of narcissistic defense in attachment deficit." The spirit's narrative names the same thing more simply and accurately: the desire to be big when you were destroyed as small is not a disease. It is a response. A response that became a monster.
For the clinic, this is important: early intervention should work not with aggressiveness as such, but with restoring agency – the feeling that you can influence the world through legal means.
IV. Third Node: Derealization of the Victim as a Defense Mechanism, Not an Inherent Trait
The standard criminological model assumes that the serial killer initially lacks empathy – a psychopath for whom other people do not exist as living beings.
The "spirit" describes something else: "This person was a tool, a pawn, a means. I didn't see a living, feeling person in him – he was just an animal."
This is not an absence of empathy from birth. This is active derealization – a psychological process of shutting off the perception of another as alive, which is triggered at the moment of the crime. This difference is fundamental.
The first is a neurological deficit (psychopathy). The second is a dissociative defense mechanism against the unendurability of one's own action. A person capable of dissociative derealization is not a psychopath in the classical sense – he uses dissociation as a tool.
This explains the phenomenon that always puzzled investigators: Chikatilo was a caring father, a good colleague, a party member. The double life was not a psychopath's mask – it was possible because derealization was triggered situationally, not his permanent state.
Clinically, this shifts the diagnosis from "antisocial personality disorder" to a more complex picture: severe PTSD with dissociative episodes, superimposed on narcissistic pathology, with preserved empathy in "safe" contexts.
V. Fourth Node: Accumulation as a Process, Not a State
The most valuable and least studied clinical idea in the "spirit's" narrative is the description of the internal state as an accumulative process.
"Fear, grievances, hatred, anxieties – all of it was in a lump. When I left the incarnation, my soul was – block upon block."
"The hatred that I accumulated. That I need to transform."
This is not a diagnostic point – it is a dynamic description of degradation. The spirit speaks of destruction happening gradually, layer by layer: childhood trauma → inability to process it → accumulation of affective tension → fantasy as the only pressure valve → gradual compression of reality to the point where murder becomes the "logical" way out.
Clinical psychology describes this process piecemeal: Ressler's "gate" concept, Douglas's "murderous fantasy" model, Melton's theory of "narcissistic collapse." But none give the phenomenology from within: what this process feels like to the person in real time.
The spirit's narrative, if taken seriously, says: it feels like a growing lump that the person does not know how to dissolve, because he was never taught. This is not a will to evil – it is an inability to discharge, accumulated to critical mass.
For prevention, this means: identifying people in a state of growing affective lump is possible before they commit a crime. It is not a death sentence – it is a signal.
VI. Fifth Node: Social Humiliation as a Specific Trigger
The narrative contains one detail that clinical literature usually mentions in passing, but which in the "spirit's" description occupies a central place: public humiliation, humiliation in front of witnesses.
The Germans raped him in front of his mother. The mother was humiliated before his eyes. Men laughed at him at the store in front of everyone. Classmates called his mother a "German whore" in public.
Each trauma is not just pain. It is pain experienced in the presence of others who laugh or remain silent. This creates a specific type of shame – shame-in-the-presence-of-witnesses, which is fundamentally different from shame when alone with oneself.
This type of shame, according to June Price Tangney, is associated not with the desire to make amends, but with the desire to destroy the source of shame or destroy oneself. Chikatilo chose the former.
If the "spirit" is accurate in its emphasis – the main clinical target for prevention is not just "trauma," but "public humiliation, not processed with anyone significant." It is precisely this combination – humiliation plus isolation plus the absence of an adult who could help make sense of it – that forms what the spirit's narrative calls the "lump of grievances."
VII. Sixth Node: What Science Barely Addresses – The Mother's Role as a Vessel of Fear
The narrative contains a point that the clinical literature on Chikatilo practically ignores: the mother regularly told the child that the neighbors might eat him. That his brother had been eaten. That they themselves had almost been eaten.
The "spirit" says this was her "delirium" – a product of her own trauma and alcoholism. But the child doesn't know the difference between mother's delirium and reality.
This describes what is today called "transgenerational transmission of trauma" – when a parent, without processing their own horror, transmits to the child not just fear, but a specific picture of the world: the body is something that can be eaten. The world is a place where you can literally be consumed.
Cannibalism in Chikatilo's crimes is one of the most mysterious aspects. Standard explanations speak of fetishization of power. The spirit's narrative offers a different vector: a child raised in the atmosphere of his mother's stories about people being eaten could internalize cannibalism as a deep symbolic language – a language of consumption, power, survival.
This is not an excuse. It is a hypothesis about the psycho-symbolic mechanism that clinical science has hardly developed with respect to serial killers.
VIII. What the Narrative Adds – and What It Does Not
Honesty requires separation.
What the "spirit" narrative articulates with unusual clarity:
Phenomenology of power as an ontological experience, primary in relation to sexuality
Subjective experience of the growing affective lump as a process over time
The central role of public shame, not just pain
Possible link between the mother's traumatic narrative and specific forms of crimes
What the narrative repeats that is known:
Role of childhood trauma (known)
Double life as a psychological reality (known)
Empathy deficit as a situational mechanism (debated)
What the narrative does not add:
Anything about neurobiology
Anything that could be operationalized into a diagnostic tool without independent verification
Any data that cannot be explained by the "spirit" being a projection of well-studied biographical facts through the intuition of the channeler
IX. Conclusion: The Value of First-Person Narrative
Regardless of the metaphysical status of channeling, this narrative raises a question that clinical psychology handles poorly: what does the experience sound like from within?
Science builds models from the outside. It observes behavior, measures hormones, scans brains. But it rarely asks – and even more rarely gets an answer – the question: what is it like to be a person in whom this lump is growing? What is it like when the only moment you feel real is the moment of another's death?
If the "spirit" narrative – even as an artistic projection, even as an intuitive reconstruction – answers this question more accurately than interrogation protocols, that in itself is clinically valuable. Not as a source of facts. But as a phenomenological map.
Clinical psychology knows how to measure. It is less adept at understanding. The first-person narrative, however controversial its source, reminds us: understanding is also necessary – to see in time the person in whom the future monster is being built, and to reach out a hand before the lump becomes an avalanche.
