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Comparison and contrast between two stories of poe's works
Jeffrey dahmer behaviors
Investigation of psychopathy
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Jeffrey Dahmer was a modern day serial killer. His heinous, sadistic, and evil crimes landed him in jail for life where he was killed by a fellow inmate shortly after reporting to jail. The question to pose is why he committed these monstrous acts.
I believe that Jeffrey Dahmer was a psychopath. According to the Table 3.2 handout on Characteristics of a Psychopath, a psychopath displays superficial charm and good "intelligence", and lack of remorse or shame as well as a few other qualities. Dahmer used his charm to lure young men from bars to his home where he would then commit his crimes. He also never displayed any type of remorse for his actions. I think if he had remorse, he would’ve stopped after his first crime. Living with guilt is difficult, it takes a psychopath to live with 17 victims. I also think that his crimes are culpable and that he knew he was
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doing was wrong and he still continued to commit terrible acts. A weakness of this argument is that we don’t really know if he was feeling remorse.
Just because he wasn’t displaying it openly doesn’t mean he didn’t feel anything. Also, Dahmer, might have been suffering from a mental illness as well as psychopathy. In the testimony of Dahmer’s Psychologist, she mentions that he was suffering from a mental illness called necrophilia. Which is sexual relations or attractions towards corpses. Although this may be true, I still don’t think that having this mental illness would cause a man to commit more than 15 crimes just for his need to have sexual relations with dead bodies because he did more than just kill them and have sex. He mutilated the bodies in various ways. Park Dietz, a highly regarded forensic psychiatrist, mentions that Dahmer wore condoms when having sexual relations with the bodies and many times was drunk which shows his lack of sexual desire and aversion to what he was doing (Adler 104-05). I don’t think any society anywhere would deem this behavior as normal, nor would they accept it as some kind of mental illness. These were deliberate acts he
committed. Jeffrey Dahmer did not have a loving childhood. In an article I read about the Etiology of the Psychopath, the author mentions that Jeffrey Dahmer had a mentally ill mother who ingested numerous drugs while pregnant with Jeffrey. This could have caused Dahmer to be born with a sickness and a liking to odd things. His father was also a chemist, so Jeffrey had access to various chemicals to experiment with. This can help explain why he took the skin off of his victims and dried out the skulls. It seems that Jeffrey liked to collect the bones of his victims. Dahmer’s mother also abandoned him and took his younger brother when he was eighteen. Some may argue that he was old enough to take care of himself, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. I think that Dahmer felt abandoned by his mother and he resented her for it. This can be related to the psychoanalytic theory described in the textbook. He had a conscience so weak that he could not control his impulses (Adler 91). In conclusion, I believe that Jeffrey Dahmer was a psychopath who committed crimes because he had certain impulses he couldn’t control due to his weak conscience. I do not believe that he was insane because he knew he was committing crimes and felt no remorse, nor do I feel that necrophilia is an appropriate title for the mental illness he might have had. He was a man who was missing attention in his life. He did not grow up in a nurturing home which leads me to conclude this is a classic nature vs. nurture argument. He was not stimulated correctly while growing up and thus resulted in his wild and sick rampage of getting satisfaction by killing and mutilating young men. Reference Page
Dahmer, for example, essentially wanted others to be submissive to him; this served a basis for having his victims rendered unconscious before he did the truly disturbing aspects of his actions. He also craved the everlasting companionship that having corpses around could satisfy well enough because he also did not want them to leave, either. Suppressing his true feelings also played a major role in the attacks. He refused to share anything, so dark fantasies grew heavier in his mind and eventually led to 17 deaths. Finally, death fascinated him, as well as control, from a young age, which led to him killing and dissolving animals in acid. Simply put, Jeffrey Dahmer had predominantly selfish, compulsion-driven reasons for doing his crimes. In contrast, Grendel was only acrid that he did not have the comitatus that the Danes had. He also hated the songs about God that the people in Herot sang due to God exiling him. While Dahmer obsessed over the concept of death itself, Grendel was more obsessed with the act of killing, even getting giddy over seeing the sleeping warriors in the mead hall. As can be seen, Grendel and Dahmer had wildly different motives for committing their
In the book, The Serial Killer Whisperer: How One Man’s Tragedy Helped Unlock the Deadliest Secrets of the World’s Most Terrifying Killers, Tony Ciaglia writes letters to various serial killers and starts a friendship with them. The friendships Tony’s build’s with these serial killer’s through phone calls and letters helped law enforcement in more than one way. The serial killers trust Tony and opens up to him about things they’ve done and why. The Serial Killer Whisperer gives readers an inside look of serial killers minds. Although the letters in this novel are between Tony and various serial killers, Pete Earley is the author. He interviewed Tony and his friends and families. Pete Earley is also the author of three New York Times bestsellers and he has won the Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime. Ealey wrote this gripping tale in a way that would captivate any audience.
Dahmer was a pretty normal, but very lonely kid. His loneliness followed him throughout the course of his life. Never having an intimate friendship or relationship, along with being consumed with confusion over his own sexuality eventually led him to become the household name he is today. From 1978 to 1991, Dahmer murdered 17 boys and men. Not only is he considered a murderer, but he committed (on several occasions) rape and dismemberment. After his later murders, he was found guilty of necrophilia, cannibalism, and permanent preservation of body parts. He is arguably the most well known, gruesome, and intriguing criminal in American history.
were also very hard for the Dahmer family to deal with. To many it was
Jeffrey Dahmer was born May 21st, 1960, the first child for Lionel and Joyce Dahmer, after a difficult pregnancy that had Joyce on various prescription drugs.
Brogaard, Berit. "The Making of a Serial Killer." Psychology Today. Sussex Directories, Inc., 7 Dec. 2012. Web. 03 May 2014.
Lionel and Joyce Dahmer gave birth to their first born, Jeffrey Dahmer, on May 21, 1960 in Milwaukee. Despite Joyce experiencing a difficult pregnancy, Dahmer was a healthy child who was wanted and adored by both his parents. However, his mother did start to become distant to him as she refused to breast feed him and started demonstrating unstable behavior along with substance abuse. Meanwhile, his father was pursuing his doctoral for chemistry in Iowa which limited the time Lionel had with his family. At age five, Dahmer’s little brother was born and that was when the feeling of neglect set in him. For the first time, the little attention provided from his parents had to be shared with his brother David. Dahmer began displaying extreme shyness but also severe tantrums. During the ages of six and seven, Dahmer “was regarded by other children as odd and bizarre (Martens, 2005).” Even though he did not show any interest in developing genuine social relations, Dahmer did demonstrate a fascination with bug and animal dissections. When Dahmer was six he had “undergone hernia surgery, when he woke up from the anesthesia he was worried someone could have cut his genitals, the pain lasted for one week and after a long recovery period his parents remember he turned to be very loner (Giannetakis, n.d.).” It is believed that at age eight Dahmer had been sexually abused by a boy in his neighborhood (Hickey, 2013). If this event did occur, it could explain why he developed destructive sexual fantasies at the young age of twelve. Despite him being aloof, it has been reported that he would seek attention by faking epileptic seizures at school and local shops. By his adolescent years, he developed compulsive masturbation which would eventually lead to legal trouble (Silva, 2002). At the age of fourteen, Dahmer turned to alcohol abuse in order to overcome his feeling of despair and compulsive thoughts of sexual violent acts.
When Dahmer was caught I think that most people wrote him off meaning they had already decided that he was the devil so it didn’t matter if he had a mental disorder people wanted Dahmer to pay for what he did. I think that monsters are made because the aggression that Dahmer possessed had to have come from somewhere and I think that at some point in his life he developed these aggressive feelings and he chose to take his aggression out on his victims. In conclusion, even though Dahmer committed terrible crimes and his actions were inexcusable, I think that there was a reason behind all of his killings besides the fact that he was just a monster.
As many people already know Jeffrey Dahmer as a crazy, weird, and psychotic person. Jeffrey Dahmer is one of the most well-known serial killers in the history of the United States and people from the United States just don’t know him people from everywhere will recognize the name Jeffrey Dahmer. It is to be told that Mr. Jeffrey Dahmer had an average childhood as every other child did. Jeffrey Dahmer was born on May 21st, 1960 in West Allis, WI; his parents were Joyce and Lionel Dahmer. Jeffrey Dahmer was a normal child growing up but it all started to change at the age of ten years old when his parents started to notice that he was starting to drift away from people and keep to himself. Jeffrey Dahmer had his parents with him until he was eighteen that’s when his parents started to have marriage problems and communicating with each another. As every other kid would be outside playing basketball, baseball, physical sports that normal kids would participate in Jeffrey Dahmer would keep to himself, then rather being involved with the other children by playing with dead animals. He loved using chemicals to watch animals dissolve and decompose. As Jeffrey Dahmer was in high school, he had found alcohol were he had begun drinking heavily and constantly. His parents had notice the growing problem of his alcoholism. His father had tried to make him stop drinking by making him enlist in to the army so he could get away from everything. Jeffrey Dahmer did enlist into the Army but not for very long he had got kicked out of the Army for his drinking problem that he had acquired from back in high school. Having a stable home was hard for Jeffrey Dahmer to find after the Army. He had moved down to Florida but while down there he had live...
During Dahmer’s psychiatric evaluation, Dr. Wahlstrom concluded, “Jeffrey was suffering from a mental illness never cured for” (FBI 1992). This leads me to perceive that Dahmer must have been displaying psychotic traits that went unnoticed and undocumented during his early lifetime. I can only speculate that this uncured mental illness lead Dahmer to develop and refine his inability to empathize with society; which in turn, lead him to engage in cruelty without mentally comprehending the victim’s suffering. Although the causes for psychopathy are unclear, some suggest that psychogenic aspects can outline abnormalities which may be present in psychopaths (Schmalleger 2014). When looking at Dahmer’s distant relationship with his parents early on in his childhood, I became conscious of the fact the lack of affection from his parents which may have lead him to develop twisted views on how one should display affection to others, thus prompting him to show psychotic behavior later on in life (The profile of Jeffrey Dahmer 1996). Even though the letter of the law fails to describe Dahmer and even if he was not fit to stand trial, I believe the court would have declared him fit for trial due to the brutality of the
“My consuming lust was to experience their bodies. I viewed them as objects, as strangers. It is hard for me to believe a human being could have done what I've done”(Dahmer). Jeffrey Dahmer is notably one of the most infamous serial killers in the United States. Along with seventeen murders under his belt, he was also a pedophile, cannibal and necrophiliac.
Between 1978 and 1991, Jeffrey Dahmer kidnapped, raped, murdered, cannibalized, and desecrated the bodies of 17 men and boys in Wisconsin. His trial was highly publicized because of the brutality of his crimes, the high death count, and the calm sociopathic tendencies he displayed while under arrest and on trial. "He knew [what he did] was evil." This was what prosecutor Michael McCann had to say against Dahmer’s claim to insanity during his trial. The jury also agreed as Dahmer was given 15 terms of life imprisonment without chance of parole when the jury deemed him legally sane. “The euphemistic-sounding words reflected everyone's overwhelming need to deny their revulsion at Dahmer's atrocities and the issues arising from them.” This is a quote from one of the jurors after hearing Dahmer’s defense of
Throughout all stages of the Dahmer case, we witness this detailed process of social constructions that include his childhood, his murders, his arrest by the police, the uncovering of gruesome evidence in his apartment, the public trial, there is also a question floating around about his clutch on sanity, his sentencing and his time in jail, and, finally, Dahmer's violent death in prison. In tracing the development of the case, Tithecott outlines the social roles that the serial killer can be made to play; he can appear as animal, kind person, royalty, crazed homosexual, outgoing loner, or a deadly infection of the social body. Tithecott's basis throughout analysis is that "serial killing should not be explained away as 'something else,' but that the serial killer is 'doing what he wants to do,' making his fantasies come tragically true" (p. 59). The book's two major topics, one entitled "Policing the Serial Killer," the other "Dreaming the Serial Killer". "Dreaming the Serial Killer," suggests that these fantasies the killer lives out are shared by his family and the environment around him. Also visions of crooked views the killers need
- Jeffery Dahmer was always seen as very shy and isolated at an early age. Dahmer had fantasies about killing men and having
When one hears the term serial killer, it’s likely the name Jeffrey Dahmer will come to mind. Dahmer can be argued to be one of the most notorious serial killers to have ever lived. During Dahmer’s childhood, there were many signs that hinted he had the potential to commit such heinous crimes. While Jeffrey Dahmer was in his teenage years, a group of boys found the head of a dog impaled on a stick behind the Dahmer home. According to forensic psychiatrists, “such a fascinations with death and cruelty to animals is an almost predictable sign in the lives of people accused of being serial killers” (Goleman). There has been several serial killers who have been accused of animal abuse, similar to Jeffrey Dahmer, because they have complete control over the animals. Many other neighbors stated they found frogs and other small animals staked to trees, as well as Jeffrey had a shed full of the skeletons of the animals he mutilated. However, the people who knew what went on in the Dahmer household did not report the animal cruelty they witnessed until Dahmer was arrested for the murders of his victims; there is the possibility they could have put a stop to Dahmer’s inhumane actions before they even