The essential features of pyromania are deliberate and purposeful fire setting on more than one occasion, tension or affective arousal before setting the first and intense pleasure, gratification, or relief when setting the fires or seeing firstborn. There is also general fascination with and interest in every aspect of fires. Although the fire setting results from the failure to resist an impulse, there may be considerable advance preparation in order to start the fire. A diagnosis of pyromania should not be made when fires are set to make money, to express scoiopolitical ideology, to conceal criminal activity, to express anger or vengeance, to improve one�s living circumstances, or to respond to a delusion or hallucination.
WHO CAN BE A FIRESETTER ?

Only a small percentage of those adults who set fires can be classified as having pyromania. The disorder is found far more often in males than in females.More people who set fires are likely to be mildly retarded than are those who do not set firs.Some studies have noted an increased incidence of alcohol abuse in people who set fires.Fire setters also tend to have a history of antisocial traits, such as truancy,running away from home,and deliquency.Enuresis has been considered to be common finding in the history of fire setters.Studies have suggested a greater association between cruelty to animals find fire setters,as compared with people wh do not set fires.Persons with sexual perversions are more likely to be firesetters.

Freud gave unconscious meaning to fire,seeing it as a symbol of sexuality.The warmth that is radiated by fire evokes the same sensation that accompanies a state of sexual excitation,and the shape and movements of a flame suggest a phallus in activity.

Other threapists have associated pyromania with an abnormal craving for power and social pretige,some pyromaniacs are volunteer fire fighters who set fires to prove themselves brave,to force other fire fighters in to action,or to demonstrate their power to extinguish a blaze.The act is a way to vent accumulated rage over social,physcial or sexual inferiority;an attempt to etablish lost relationship with an authority figure like father; a respose to knowledge about parental infidelity or having experience incest. Fire setting is may represent a cry for help and the wish to elicit responses from significant other. There can be biochemical substrate contributing to repeatd firesetting behavior.