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This study is based on the author’s experience of providing expert assessments of around a dozen serial killers. In most of these individuals, psychic survival appears to be organized around three variably weighted features: psychopathic imbalance, defensive behavior of a narcissistic perverse type, and annihilation anxiety.What fundamentally differentiates those who fail to dam the bloody gulf from those who maintain a relative marginal adaptation—that is, the perversely delusional and unbalanced—is the force of the splitting of the ego.Drawing in particular on the work of Paul-Claude Racamier, Claude Balier, and René Roussillon, the repetition of criminal acts is understood as both submission to the automaton of repetition and its demiurge-like appropriation with each subsequent crime.Through narcissistic perverse defenses, the risk of secondary collapse via hallucinatory reactivation of the traumatic zone is transformed into a triumphant act and narcissistic orgy.