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Perry Smith's Nature And Nurture

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Are people designed or defined? Some say that inherited traits design individuals. However, others say the way life treats a person defines them. In the case of Perry Smith, nurture seems to be casting the deciding vote in his life. Nurture definitely trumps nature in deciding the way Perry Smith 's inner thoughts, feelings, and actions take shape.
Perry Smith 's inner musings form as a result of the suffering he undergoes throughout his life. Perry contemplates many thoughts that the reader is able to see in In Cold Blood, and these thoughts seem to have a great deal to do with his turbulent past. He divulges, quite clearly, just how much every major event in his life affected him. For example, Perry describes to the reader the first …show more content…

Humankind has mistreated him repeatedly since he was a child. Children can’t handle emotions very well. If they feel mistreated they believe they are being mistreated, and if they feel unloved they believe they are unloved.Young juveniles don 't try to reason away their emotions; they are what they are. So when a child builds up so much negative emotion, those feelings don 't just go away. They stick with the child forever, or until the child resolves them. The psychiatrist who evaluated Perry in In Cold Blood(Pg. 191) stated quite distinctly, "The history relating to extreme violence, whether fantasied, observed in reality, or actually experienced by the child, fits in with the psychoanalytic hypothesis that the child 's exposure to overwhelming stimuli, before he can master them, is closely linked to early defects in ego formation and later severe disturbances in impulse control. In all of these cases, there was evidence of severe emotional deprivation in early life." This clearly describes the person of Perry Smith. He underwent "severe emotional deprivation" as a child, and as an adult, he does indeed have "defects in ego formation" and no "impulse control". His lack of impulse control is evident when Perry slits Herb Clutter 's throat. "But I didn 't mean it. I meant to call his bluff, make him argue me out of it, make him admit he was a phony and a coward. See, it was something between me and Dick. I knelt down beside Mr.

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