In later years, the German researchers’ conclusions would be proven to have no scientific basis—in every other study, the vast majority of arsonists have been men. Most of those men reflect the racial demographics of the area they live in: a predominantly black neighborhood would be more likely to have a black arsonist, a white neighborhood would have a white arsonist, and so on. A majority of arsonists have IQs below the range considered normal. A disproportionately high percentage of them struggle with substance abuse or have been diagnosed with schizophrenia; a disproportionately high percentage of them are adolescents or young adults.
Research on female arsonists is incomplete at best, though the research that does exist suggests that female fire setters are more likely than males to do so with a revenge motive in mind, and more likely to set fire to buildings with emotional meaning rather than to random structures. Ugandan spiritual leader Credonia Mwerinde once set fire to the possessions of a man who had spurned her, and then later instructed some of her followers to burn down the home of a man who had refused to join her cult, and then later, after her predictions about the end of the world did not come to pass in 2000, brought six hundred members of her cult into a church filled with gas cans, locked them in, and left them to perish in a fire. (There are disputes as to whether she actually lit the match in that instance.) In some studies, the percentage of female arsonists was as high as 35 percent, in others, women were as low as 4 percent, but they do not appear as the majority in any recent study.
In time, scientists began realizing that all women got periods, not just peasants and not just arsonists, and so perhaps a better explanation was needed to explain arson. Sigmund Freud suggested, as he was prone to do, that people who set fires did so for reasons related to phalluses. Flames themselves were reminiscent in shape and movement to penises, Freud argued, and thus attraction to them could represent homosexual impulses in men and heterosexual impulses in women. Of course, the same attraction could be used to describe not only arsonists but also aspiring firefighters: “It is as if primitive man had the impulse, when he came into contact with fire, to gratify an infantile pleasure with respect to it and put it out with a stream of urination,” he wrote in a 1930 essay. “Putting a fire out by urination represented a sexual act in man.”
Aside from the German and Freudian research, a French scientist named Charles Chrétian Henri Marc contributed his own thoughts to the field in the mid-1830s. A compulsive setting of fires was, he decided, merely a problem of impulse control. At the time of his research, there was a subset of crimes that fell under the umbrella category of “monomania.” Crimes under this umbrella term were, Marc described, “against nature, so monstrous and without reason as to be explicable only through insanity, yet perpetrated by subjects apparently in full possession of sanity.”
Arson, he decided, deserved to be a special subset of these illnesses. He first called it monomanie incendiaire, and then, a term familiar even to twenty-first-century readers, “pyromania.”
Americans were not sure at first how they felt about pyromania as a psychiatric illness. The term crossed the pond around the same time as the assassination of President James Garfield in 1881. The assailant had been a delusional man who believed he was responsible for Garfield’s presidential victory and owed a Cabinet post. America was uneasy with the idea that criminals could use mental illness as an excuse for bad behavior, as psychiatrist Jeffrey Geller chronicles in a history of American fire setting. In the late nineteenth century, the thinking was that things ought to be black and white. Either someone shot the president, or he didn’t. Either someone lit a fire, or he didn’t. The reason why shouldn’t matter.
But current researchers realize there are lots of fathomable, logical reasons people light fires, even if that logic is sometimes profoundly twisted. The Center for Arson Research, run by a psychologist named Dian Williams, has divided fire setters into categories. Experimental fire setters, usually children, who light fires once and then never do it again. Thought-disordered fire setters, whose arson is a symptom of greater mental illness—the kind of arsonist who might believe, for example, that his fires are a message from a voice only he can hear. Communicative fire setters, who use their fire to convey a message they find themselves unable to otherwise convey. (Jeffrey Geller writes about one such patient—a forty-three-year-old woman who’d spent her adult life at a mental hospital after trying to burn down her family’s house as a teenager. Whenever she grew unhappy with her living situation and wanted to be moved, she lit another fire.)
It’s not unheard of—in fact, it’s practically become a trope—for firefighters to become arsonists in an attempt to become heroes, lighting fires and then racing to the scene to put them out. Williams puts these arsonists in the “thrill-seeking” category. The most famous American arsonist, John Leonard Orr, was a thrill-seeking arsonist. His day job was a fire captain and investigator for the Glendale Fire Department in California. On his own time, he lit hundreds of fires, one of which killed four people. He even wrote a novel called Points of Origin, about a serial arsonist in Southern California. Points of Origin, he swore after he was caught, proved nothing about his own acts. Those who were obsessed with the Orr case could not help but notice, however, that the protagonist’s name, Aaron Stiles, could be arranged into a particular anagram: “I set L.A. arsons.”
The people in the preceding examples were all arsonists, but some of them might not necessarily have been pyromaniacs, at least not by the modern definition. “Pyromania” is an overused term. A group of psychiatrists in the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law once explained it this way: “Firesetting is a behavior. Arson is a crime. Pyromania is a psychiatric diagnosis.”
“Arson” does not exist in the American Psychological Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. But pyromania does. It is the only subset of fire setting that is explicitly included in the DSM. It is defined as “experiencing tension or affective arousal before setting a fire, and feelings of pleasure, gratification, or relief during or after fire-starting.”