Makes me think of a book one of my sister's turned me on to "The Alchemy of Love and Lust," all about the different hormones and their functions and how a person can do things in order to achieve a better bond with others. You can read an excerpt of it at google books:
http://books.google.com/books?id=de2KAi7_6s4C&printsec=frontcover&dq=alchemy+of+love+and+lust.pdf&hl=en&sa=X&ei=vxH7Tp3LHcqQiAL1h4WkDg&ved=0CDMQuwUwAA#v=onepage&q=alchemy%20of%20love%20and%20lust.pdf&f=falseAlso, makes me think of Fatal Attraction where Glenn Close's character got a little attention from Michael Douglas' character and when he backed off she boiled his bunny.
(Sorry, don't mean to make light of the women (and men) out there who are that obsessive/compulsive. It's just that, that movie was so over-dramatized it was almost silly.)
But I can see how people can get that attached, almost addicted to another just from touch. Since oxytocin is the chemical that bonds mother and child at birth, and I've researched it and oxytocin actually produces as euphoric a feeling as do opiates--like heroin, then it should come as no surprise that some people will resort to doing stupid maniacal stuff just to get a fix.
We each have the amazing capability of manipulating another's emotions so easily (except for the 5 percent of psychopaths and that tells me we need to be very careful and carry a syringe filled oxytocin just in case. j/k) I have been the victim of this once or twice or three or four times.
Looking back, the hug/touch-trust method is the very method I believe those priests used to manipulate all those young boys into giving themselves up.
But I digress...