Jeffery Dahmer

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 born in Milwaukee on May 21, 1960, to Lionel and Joyce Dahmer. Despite the difficulties of Joyce's pregnancy, he was wanted and adored as a child. By all accounts, Dahmer displayed traits of a happy, bubbly youngster. However, several events from his childhood indicated that the young boy was becoming more and more disturbed. When Jeff was four, his father swept out the remains of some small animals from under the house. As his father gathered the tiny animal bones, Jeff seemed strangely entertained by the sound they made (Bardsley Ch. 13). At the young age of six, Dahmer suffered a double hernia and needed surgery to correct the problem. After the operation, he was never the same socially. Adding insult to injury, the family then moved from Iowa to Ohio where it became apparent Dahmer had grown distant, shy, and nearly uncommunicative (Bardsley Ch. 13).

As a young student, Dahmer, very fond of one of his elementary school teachers, took her a bowl of tadpoles he had caught. Soon Dahmer learned that his teacher had given the tadpoles to his friend Lee. He ...

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...rocess of ‘walking through’, in which the patient and therapist examine the same issues repeatedly in the course of several sessions, each time with greater clarity. This process is enduring, usually lasting for a number of years (Comer 41).

Due to the presence of such a multitude of abnormal behaviors, the most helpful form of psychodynamic treatment available would be the short-term psychodynamic therapies that focus on one individual issue at a time. Perhaps the abnormalities could have been deciphered and treated separately through this type of therapy in order to improve his behavior. It is impossible to say for sure, but had Dahmer sought or been forced into treatment for his many abnormal behaviors, therapists may have been reasonably successful in identifying the underlying causes before he felt compelled to take innocent lives.