Jeffrey Dahmer & Theories Explaining His Behavior

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Jeffrey Dahmer & Theories Explaining His Behavior

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.

Dahmer was born on May 21, 1960. He was born in Milwaukee to Lionel and Joyce Dahmer. His father was an extremely severe alcoholic and was very much distant and uninvolved with his wife. His mother had issues with her pregnancy and started taking drugs in order to treat her sickness. Dahmer ended up having issues with his legs shortly after he was born and couldn’t move until he was around four-months-old. His mother, eventually, began to show signs of instability. His mother resorted to taking even more antidepressants and psychotropic drugs. Dahmer, on the contrast, was growing up normal.

Within the earlier years of his parents’ marriage, Dahmer and his family moved six times. In 1962, they ended up in Iowa due to Dahmer’s father being accepted into a doctoral program in chemistry. Dahmer got exceptionally sick during this period and ended up requiring many injections to treat the infections that he succumbed to. “Toward the end of his third year, he came down with a series of infections—ear, throat, mild pneumonia—that caused him to cry through the night” (Nichols, 2006, p246). Dahmer was shy when he began preschool. When Dahmer was four, his father found some dead animals that were in decompositi...

... middle of paper ...

...een identified and labeled as many different things, there are two things we know for sure: 1) Dahmer was a serial killer and 2) Dahmer was a sexual offender.

References

Cyriax, Oliver. 2009. Dahmer, Jeffrey L. (1960-94). Encyclopedia of Crime. p86-88.

Nichols, David S. Jun2006. Tell Me a Story: MMPI Responses and Personal Biography in the Case of a Serial Killer. Journal of Personality Assessment. Vol. 86 Issue 3, p242-262.

Saborsky, Amy L. & Ramsland, Katherine. 2013. Distance Diagnosis: Can We Really Tell Whether Dahmer had Asperger’s Disorder? Forensic Examiner, Vol. 22 Issue 2, p42-48.

Terry, K. J. (2013). Sexual offenses and offenders: Theory, practice, and policy. (2nd e.d.)

Ullman, Joan. “I carried it too far, that’s for sure”: A first-person report from the insanity trial of Jeffrey Dahmer. Psychology Today. p1.

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