Jeffrey Dahmer was a serial killer and a sex offender who is recorded to have killed over fifteen victims under very intriguing circumstances. When he was ultimately arrested to face trial, not so much had been known about this secretive individual that often engaged in a sex ritual with his victims after killing them. Dahmer had been diagnosed with schizotypal personality disorder, psychotic disorder, and borderline personality disorder. This paper seeks to explore the factors which could have triggered Dahmer’s criminal behavior.
Early stages of life
Born on May 21, 1960, to Joyce Annette and Lionel Herbert Dahmer, Jeffrey Dahmer grew up in the company of both parents. However, his mother had an argumentative personality and was known to demand constant attention from her husband by working herself into anxiety. Dahmer’s father, on the other hand, spent most of his time at the university studying. For this reason, Dahmer suffered from lack of attention from both parents from an early age. However, that did not dampen his childhood as he was known to be an energetic and happy child ( Jones, 2013) . Dahmer’s personality changed drastically at the age of four years when he underwent double surgery for a hernia . He was regarded as quiet and timid by his classmates, and his teacher observed that he was a reserved child that she felt was neglected.
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Jeffrey Dahmer began to show interest in insects from a young age; he would collect dragonflies and butterflies which he would place in a jar. Dahmer would also often collect carcasses of dead animals which he would later cut into pieces ( Jones, 2013) . His father also noted his fascination with the sound of animal bones right from the age of four years. Through his high school years, Dahmer was largely quiet although his classmates noticed that he would take alcohol constantly ( Coyle et al., 2015) .
He was known to be a highly intelligent student who played tennis. He was known to amuse his classmates by staging several pranks which became known as “doing a Dahmer”; he amused his friends by simulating epileptic seizures and bleating among other tricks. Dahmer discovered that he was a gay at puberty but never divulged this detail to his parents who were by then separated. He joined the Ohio State University after high school but dropped out after two semesters after continuously skipping classes and getting drunk ( Coyle et al. , 2015) .
Social behaviour
In 1979, Dahmer joined the army but could not stay for long because of his drunken behavior . He later secured employment at the delicatessen and rented a room at a motel in Miami. He spent most of his salary on drinking and was ultimately evicted from the motel for nonpayment. He resorted to spending his evenings at the beach as he worked and ultimately called his father and requesting to return home to Ohio. His drinking ways soon made the family uncomfortable, and the father and his new wife opted to send him to his grandmother; the only family member to whom Dahmer displayed affection. According to Coyle et al. (2015), this arrangement worked well for Dahmer at the start as he was said to have willingly undertaken household chores and even accompanied her to church. It was while he lived with his grandmother that Dahmer secured employment at the Milwaukee Blood Plasma center as a phlebotomist. He worked for ten months before he was laid off.
After losing his employment, Dahmer was arrested after exposing himself indecently to a crowd of twenty-five women and children and convicted in August of 1982. Jacobi et al. (2014) explain that Dahmer was hired as a mixer at the Milwaukee Ambrosia Chocolate Factory working for six nights per week. Shortly after he found this employment, Dahmer received a proposition from another man while sitting at West Allis Public Library. The strange man threw him a note offering to perform fellatio on him. Although Dahmer declined this proposition, he began to fantasize the power of control and dominance which he had developed during his teenage years. This fantasy led him to explore Milwaukee’s gay bars, bookstores, and gay bathhouses. It is also said that he stole a male mannequin from a store and used it to gratify himself sexually . His grandmother later discovered it and demanded that it be discarded (Coyle et al., 2015).
During his sexual escapades in the bathhouses where Dahmer now frequented, he would often sedate his sexual partners because he disliked his partners’ movement during the sexual act. He did this by giving his victims liquor laced with sedatives and then raped them unconscious. After several of these cases were reported, his membership to these bathhouses was revoked, and he opted to use hotel rooms for this practice (Coyle et al., 2015). During this period Dahmer read of a funeral of an 18-year old male from the newspaper and conceived the idea of stealing the interred corpse and taking it home. He abandoned the act after the grave soil proved to be too hard.
Criminal history
Jeffrey Dahmer committed his first murder on a nineteen-year-old Steven Hicks, hitchhiker whom he invited to his father’s house. The two had sex and drank, but when Hicks was ready to leave, Dahmer killed him by bashing him in the head with a barbell. He concealed the murder by cutting the body into pieces which he placed into garbage bags and buried them in the woods around his father’s property ( Beck and Haigh, 2014) . Later on being asked why he killed Hicks, Dahmer simply said that he did not want him to leave. In September of 1987, Dahmer was in the company of Steven Toumi, a twenty-six-year-old man and after the two had spent the night drinking heavily and moving from one gay bar to another, Dahmer found Toumi dead when he woke up from his drunken stupor. He put his body into a suitcase and took it to his grandmother’s basement. Dahmer fulfilled his sexual necrophilia desires on the body before he dismembered it. This murder was just but the first in a series that would seem Dahmer kill close to twenty persons. These murders were strange because after Dahmer had killed the victims mostly through strangulation, he would perform a ritual on the copse before disposing of it. In some cases, he would masturbate over the copse or have sex with it. He had this strange behavior where he would retain some of the body parts like skulls which he would refrigerate and occasionally eat them ( Beck and Haigh, 2014) .
When Dahmer was arrested following revelations about his nefarious activities, the police found horrifying discoveries in his apartment; there were a human head and bags containing two hearts in his refrigerator, two heads and a torso inside a freezer and male genitalia that were found in his closet. There were also chemicals including formaldehyde, chloroform, and ether in his room. Other paraphernalia including a claw hammer and a hand saw were also discovered. At the trial, the jury gave a guilty verdict on fifteen counts of murder amounting to fifteen life terms that totaled 937 years in prison. While serving his jail term at Columbia Correctional Institute Portage, Dahmer was murdered by a fellow inmate, Christopher Scarver, a schizophrenic convicted of first-degree murder ( Beck and Haigh, 2014) .
Application of theory
Mental health is attributed to life experiences of an individual according to behavioral theorists. Because behavior is learned, proponents of this theory opine that mental treatment should rely on processes by which behaviors change in response to the environment. This view embraces the concept of conditioning by which individuals behave in certain ways after receiving rewards ( Jones, 2013) . This is based on the classic experiment by Pavlov to determine the behavior of dogs at the sound of a bell. Jeffrey Dahmer’s conduct can be attributed to the conduct of his early childhood caregivers. Dahmer’s parents denied him the requisite attention at a young age and went on to divorce. It is likely that these set of events had a devastating effect on Dahmer’s behavior and made him vulnerable to unconventional conduct.
The psychodynamic theorists believe that actions are largely determined by life experiences. In this regard, there is no behavior that is accidental. This model was first formulated by Sigmund Freud who believed that there are three forces that shape personality, i.e., the id, ego, and superego. Whereas the id stands for needs occasioned by instinct, the ego makes use of reason while the superego represents a person’s value system. Freud (2014) proposed that an individual goes through various stages of development that require adjustments in the id, ego, and superego. He postulated that if the proper adjustment fails to occur, then an individual may end up with abnormal functioning. Dahmer’s life went through stages of turbulence, and it seems that based on this approach, the three forces never found harmony in him. The way he committed murders for very flimsy reasons suggests that he was largely operating at the id level where he was driven by instinct. Both the id and the superego had very little influence on Dahmer’s life. The parents who were to form value system in him were emotionally absent, and this scarcely prepared Dahmer for the wider world where he was expected to develop a value system.
The cognitive theory is another approach that explains the mental health of individuals. This theory lays emphasis on people’s thought system as opposed to their actions. They opine that cognitive problems like assumptions and illogical thinking that include overgeneralizations could lead to abnormal functioning (Jacobi et al., 2014). It goes on to say that people can change the way they feel and act by changing their thoughts. This approach does not fully explain Dahmer’s conduct which remained consistent even after environments were changed. His excessive drinking was not remedied even after he left school to join college. It is also clear that Dahmer’s perverted thought system remained with him right from the first instant where he contemplated murdering a jogger.
The sociological approach to criminal behavior connects criminal behavior in an individual to the social and cultural values in society. It opines that contradiction within these interacting groups contributes to criminality. Traditionally, sociological theories connect the crime to anomie in society, but later, scholars link criminal behavior to the failure of institutions to socialize individuals. This theory, however, fails to explain Dahmer’s situation because there is evidence that the institutions he went through made an effort to socialize him. His grandmother attempted to instill discipline in him to the extent of going with him to church.
Biological theories link criminality to heredity, neurotransmitter dysfunction or brain abnormalities occasioned by trauma or improper development. Although Dahmer was declared normal prior to conviction, his queer behavior during his childhood could point to some form of biological dysfunction that drove him to criminal conduct.
Reflection
Dahmer’s case provides a great learning opportunity for students of behavioral studies. It depicts the vulnerability of children regarding the care they receive at an early age. Parents have a very crucial role to play in the growth and development of children. Caring for their needs and protecting them from family challenges including violence, separation, and divorce will go a long way to ensure that children grow to become resourceful individuals in society. Students of behavioral studies should be careful not to generalize cases regarding mental health and situations under which such persons find themselves in during formative years. The case of Jeffrey Dahmer should provoke systemized studies into the psyche of persons that depict criminal behavior . As much as Dahmer had a troubled childhood, it should be noted that not all children born under such circumstances develop criminal tendencies. Aspects of personality traits and genetic disorders should be studied to establish the extent to which they determine the mental state of an individual.
Conclusion
Jeffrey Dahmer was declared mentally normal by the jury that passed judgment on him. This was after demonstrated evidence of psychological disorders. This should be a pointer on how society treats criminals who suffer other disorders. From the case study, it appears that as much as Dahmer acknowledged that he had a problem, he appeared to be helpless against the instinctive forces towards crime. It is time special services were initiated to offer life-long therapy so as to ensure therapy for themselves and society at large. Sigmund’s approach to psychodynamics can help society to understand how persons attain mental disabilities through incomplete development through the various stages of growth.
References
Beck, A. T., & Haigh, E. A. (2014). Advances in cognitive theory and therapy: the generic cognitive model. Annual review of clinical psychology , 10 , 1-24.
Coyle, J., Ross, K. F., Barnard, J. J., Peacock, E., Linch, C. A., & Prahlow, J. A. (2015). The Eyeball Killer: Serial Killings with Postmortem Globe Enucleation. Journal of forensic sciences , 60 (3), 642-647.
Freud, S. (2014). A general introduction to psychoanalysis . Ellerslie, Auckland: The Floating Press
Jacobi, F., Höfler, M., Siegert, J., Mack, S., Gerschler, A., & Scholl, L. et al. (2014). Twelve-month prevalence, comorbidity and correlates of mental disorders in Germany: The Mental Health Module of the German Health Interview and Examination Survey for Adults (DEGS1-MH). International Journal of Methods in Psychiatric Research , 23(3), 304-319. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/mpr.1439
Jones, P. B. (2013). Adult mental health disorders and their age at onset. The British Journal of Psychiatry , 202 (s54), s5-s10.
