Case Study in Abnormal Behavior
Valvita Isaac
PSY/410
April 4, 2011
Dr. Melda Jones
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Dahmer had a fascination with the human skull. He would kill his victims, and keep their skulls as souvenirs (Creekmore, 2007).
Biological Components Jeffrey Dahmer had a fairly normal life. His father and mother both worked, and they were considered middle class. As a young boy Dahmer was a bubbly, energetic individual. It didn’t seem that he could harm anyone, but by his teen years all of this changed. Jeffrey became isolated, antisocial, and non – identifying with other people (Creekmore, 2007). Dahmer was an alcoholic, which is a known disease that passes down through genetics from generation to generation. Jeffrey Dahmer’s grandfather was an alcoholic. His alcoholism was passed onto his grandson, and no one knows if the alcoholism had a link to his fascination of killing or performing weird acts on his victims. Jeffrey also came from a normal family that was not infested with criminals. He was the only one that had committed such violent, manipulative, and conniving acts (Creekmore, 2007).
Emotional Components Jeffrey Dahmer experienced an emotional shut down. He was isolated, antisocial, and withdrawn. Dahmer was without compassion, and numb to the human race. Jeffrey experienced a lonely life. As a child Jeffrey Dahmer was diagnosed with a hernia. He had to undergo an operation. Dahmer was four years old when he was diagnosed.
Like others in Fort Collins, and throughout Colorado, you may occasionally enjoy a night out drinking with friends. On such a night, you do everything right, including getting a ride home from a taxi or designated driver. The next morning, however, you are pulled over by law enforcement, arrested and charged with DUI. A morning after DUI, as this type of arrest is commonly known, may come as a surprise, but carries the same serious penalties as other drunk driving charges.
Power can be determined by many different aspects . Some people can obtain power through race, while some obtain it through social class, and others obtain it through their gender. In the book, To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee, the idea of power is discussed. The character Mayella Ewell is Bob Ewell’s daughter, who claims Tom Robinson raped her. Mayella does have power in regards to her race but does not have power in regards to her gender and social class.
Jeffrey Dahmer was born on May 21, 1960 in West Allis,Wisconsin. He and his parents, Lionel Dahmer and Joyce Annette, were an average american family who strived for the best. Jeffrey’s father was a graduate student who wanted to pursue a career as an analytical chemist. His mother worked as a teletype machine instructor. However, Jeffrey Dahmer’s mother was not a stable women. She had a history of psychological problems which meant that her son was susceptible to mental illness due to genetic factors. Growing up, Jeffrey had trouble with interacting with his peers. He also had a peculiar fascination with dead animals and “according to his father, his son was ‘oddly thrilled’ by the sound the bones made and instantly developed a fixation for playing with and collecting animal bones (“Jeffrey Dahmer” Wikipedia).” As he got older, he developed an addiction to alcohol. He started drinking heavily during high school which negatively affected his grades. Another issue that Dahmer faced in his early life was
Jeffrey Dahmer is a notorious man and it is for all of the right reasons that he has been labeled notorious. From 1987 to 1991, Jeffrey Dahmer murdered, sexually assaulted, and dismembered seventeen young men. He has been defined as many different things: necrophile, sadist maniac, psychotic, and many more. There were many signs that led up to his deviant behavior. A look into his adolescence will show some of those clear signs.
He was a major alcoholic and was forced to join the army by his father which he hated and left. After he left his drinking got worse. Then he went out to party and got hookups all the time with dudes. The amazing Jeffrey Dahmer not only got his victims drunk and drugged and raped them, he murdered them then cut them up, ate certain body parts and kept the genitals for sex toys, because it gave him ’power’ also take pictures and masturbate to the photos. Murdered 17 males starting at June 6, 1978 and he was 18, his last victim was in July 19,1991 and he was 31.
Murder, willingly taking another human's life, is considered a heinous crime in the United States, and from the sociological perspective, breaks an important more. Serial Murder, therefore, is a sociologically deviant phenomenon where a person kills two or more people in distinct events, and an FBI overview of serial killers states “No single cause, trait, or even a group of traits can differentiate or identify serial killers … from other types of violent offenders” (FBI). We can, however, use sociological perspectives to identify potential factors in these cases. As a boy, Jeffrey Dahmer was described as being a loner and a poor student- and had been sexually abused by a neighbor. He is homosexual, and all of his victims were males- which
Explained through psychoanalytic theory Jeffrey Dahmer’s personality and criminality can be seen as a result of the events of his early life traumatic events. Unfortunately, for Dahmer and his victims he was not able to be well adjusted, socially productive, and functional member of society. Instead, Jeffrey Dahmer’s un-socialized id, weak ego and poorly developed superego formed the personality and ultimately lead to criminality of infamous serial killer we know
Jeffery Dahmer is arguably the most notorious serial killer -cannibal in history. Targeting men and boys, Dahmer‘s life of crime began with drinking and sex offending. His murders were exceptionally gruesome, often involving rape, torture, necrophilia, dismemberment, and cannibalism. The media often commented on how “normal” Dahmer appeared. Jeffrey Dahmer made everyone question how one develops into such a monster. By the time of his apprehension, Dahmer had sodomized, murdered, and cannibalized at least seventeen men, mostly black, Hispanic or Asian, in the Milwaukee area between the years of 1978 until his arrest in 1991 (Williams pg.1).
Jeffrey Dahmer was a fun and active child. He liked to wrestle, run and play with other children. But when his parents started to fight, he felt alone in the world. He began hiding in the woods and collecting the carcasses of dead animals. These carcasses gave him the comfort his family and classmates did not. At the age of 31 he went to jail for the murder of 17 people, where he was killed by a fellow inmate a few years later. What drove such a happy child to become a serial killer?
(Chmelir, “Serial Killers’, pg. 750) In the teen years of a serial killer they usually are anti-social. For example, Jeffrey Dahmer's childhood started off with heavy drugs abuse with his family starting from pregnancy. As a teen he started to abuse alcohol and animals. He was fearful of people and a loner.
Jeffrey Dahmer was a sex offender and serial killer mainly between the years 1978 and 1991. He is well known for his severely atypical behaviors. Among his outward manners that are recognized as abnormal are paraphilia-specifically necrophilia and sexual sadism. Jeffrey Dahmer’s victims, whom were boys and men, suffered from rape, violence, dismemberment and finally their murders. Dahmer’s slow progression of killings soon turned into an obsession, which would later land him in prison with a sentence
According to available information, Jeffrey Dahmer led a virtually pretty normal childhood. He was born May 21 1960 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin to his parents’ Lionel and Joyce Dahmer. When he was six years old his brother David Dahmer was born and the family moved to Ohio. During the move Jeffrey became more shy and withdrawn. When he was ten years old his mother was admitted to the hospital for her anxiety. This put a strain on his parents marriage. Also, when he was around 14 or 15 years old, he started to have more thoughts about violence and sex, but “didn't know how to tell anyone about it so he didn't” (Jeffrey Dahmer). Throughout high school, he saw his
Jeffrey Dahmer was born on May 21, 1960 to parents Lionel and Joyce Dahmer (Davis, 1998). While living in his birthplace of Wisconsin, Dahmer was described by his father to be “’[v]ery exuberant, he liked to wrestle, liked to run around, ham it up for the camera and he liked to play with kids and get together with them’” (Harris, 1996). As Dahmer entered adolescence, his father earned a Ph.D. in chemistry and the family began to move around Ohio (National Center for Crisis Management, n.d.). After the move, his parents fought often and eventually divorced. During this period, Dahmer became “withdrawn and uncommunicative” (Jeffrey Dahmer, 2017) and
Jeffrey Dahmer murdered 17 men between the years of 1978 to 1991 in which he participated in necrophilia, dismemberment and cannibalism (Meyer, 2006). As a child, Dahmer was shy and suffered from low self-esteem. At a young age, Dahmer displayed abnormal behavior starting with the collecting of dead animals and using acid to strip off the meat having necrophilia desires. This escalated in his teen years turning into fantasies of killing and mutilating men. After graduating from high school, he was living alone and the feelings of abandonment returned giving him justification in his mind to commit crimes. Throughout his teens years he abused alcohol, which also lead to abnormal behavior. By the
Dahmer’s mother had pregnancy issues and took several different drugs to help; his mother was also extremely depressed--after a while, his mother developed an addiction to the drugs and abused them severely, which is extremely pernicious to the health, both physical and mental, of a growing fetus (Giannetakis). While growing up, Dahmer enjoyed to be by himself. He often took walks into the woods near his house. He would find dead animals and examine their innards; although he liked to dismember dead animals, he didn’t wish to inflict pain onto any living creature (Giannetakis).