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I don’t think Jeffery’s past paints a picture of these causes. However, no family is absolutely sterile and I guess there were some issues in the Dahmer family but where they enough to cause and individual to react as he did. There are definitely some factors that may have had a negative influence on Jeff’s life. His mother had various physical ailments and appeared to be high strung, coming from a background in which her father’s alcoholism deeply affected her life. His father stayed at work more often than he should to avoid turmoil on the home front. Eventually the marriage dissolved in divorce when Jeff was eighteen. Is this enough domestic discord to account for a serial murderer? Jeff was a child that was wanted and adored. He was a normal, healthy child whose birth was the occasion of joy. As a tot he was a happy bubbly youngster who loved stuffed bunnies and wooden blocks. He also had a dog named frisky, his much loved childhood pet. Jeff developed into a happy little boy. At the age of four, his father swept out from under their house the remains of some small animals that had been killed by crivets. Jeff seemed oddly thrilled by the sound they made. His small hands dug deep into the pile of bones. This can no longer be viewed simply as a childish episode, a passing fascination. This must of been the first sign of a malicious force growing inside Jeffery. At six he was suffering from a hernia and needed surgery. He never seemed to recover his buoyancy. It is recalled that he seemed smaller and somehow more vulnerable….he grew more inward, sitting quietly for long periods, hardly stirring, his face oddly motionless. By the time Jeff was in the first grade a strange fear had begun to creep into his personality, a dread of others that was combined with the lack of self-confidence. The prospect of going to school frightened him. The little boy who’d once seemed so happy and self-assured had been replaced by a different person, now deeply shy, distant, nearly uncommunicative. Things didn’t get better with time, according to his father. His posture and the general way in which he carried himself, changed radically between his tenth and fifteenth years. He had a strangely rigid and inflexible figure. He looked tense and grew increasingly shy and when approached by other people, he would become very tense. He remained alone at home more and more and gave the impression of someone who could do nothing but mope around, purposeless and disengaged. It was brought out that fifteen Jeff would ride around with plastic garbage bags and collect the remains of animals for his own private cemetery. He would strip the flesh from the bodies of these road kills and even mount a dog’s head on a stake. He had a fascination with dead creatures. He was drifting into a nightmare world of unimaginable fantasies. In coming years those fantasies would begin to overwhelm him. The dead in their stillness would become the primary objects of his growing sexual desire. His inability to speak about such strange and unsetting notions would sever his connections to the world outside himself. One would expect that a person harboring the fantasies of death and dismemberment that swirled around in Jeff’s head as a teenager would show some outer signs of mental illness. But Jeff just became more isolated and uncommunicative. Dr. James Fox, dean of the College of Criminal Justice at Northeastern University in Boston and recognized expert on serial killers claims, "there was nothing we could do to predict this tragedy ahead of time, no matter how bizarre the behavior". He also noted that while Jeffery was devastated when his mother left him, it would be wrong to blame his parents for what he had become. "Ever since Sigmund Freud, we blame everything bad that kids do on their parents….The culprit was Dahmer. Not his father not his family, not the police." I disagree with this statement to a degree. I believe that Jeff had some absolute different behavior as a child that went unattended to. By no means am I saying that things would have been different, but even in the recollection of his father, he could see those things now but did not see them as Jeffery was a boy. If those issues were addressed in some type of therapy there may have been a different outcome. When I look at the personality that I just read about and try to relate it to different theories of personality I see a lot of issues that coincide with all the theories. When you look at Freud and the psychoanalytic theory this type personality fits real well into the belief that conflicts concerning sexual and aggressive instincts and social inhibitions form the heart of the psychoanalytic study of behavioral dynamics. I also believe that this type personality could of used the approach that change had to deal with the unconscious and irrational desires of individuals. I am not sure that an individual capable of committing this type of behavior even has a conscious. In the learning theorist personality development is based on the formation and strengthening of habits or stimulus-response bonds. You have to look at the behavior Jeff was displaying at an early age and there was some strange behavior going on that was not dealt with. Perhaps this behavior could of been changed by altering stimulus-response connections through rewards and punishments. When I look at the cognitive approach and look into hierarchy of needs the only thing I can relate to that Jeff may have gotten is the first stage of physiological needs. When you continue to climb this ladder of needs I am not sure Jeff fulfilled any above the necessities of life. Over all I think I like the cognitive approach and that personality change involves altering one’s view of the world and ones self. Personality development is synonymous with cognitive growth, accompanied by a movement in the direction of higher goals, these are issues that Jeff seemed to be lacking and an understanding of how to deal with them. But then again you have to look at the Freudian issue that unfulfilled sexual desires result in neurotic symptoms of dreams—repressed sexual impulses and things lay dormant and dreams have true meaning. Jeff’s dreams had true meaning and they were carried out. All in all I have to say that all approaches seem to have a connection with each other and I think it is good to look at all theories and ideas when looking at a personality that was as disturbed as Jeff’s. The sad part is that I think there were signs of abnormality that went unrecognized and not treated with some type of therapy. There was something missing in Jeff and I think we call it a conscience. But where did it go or did he ever have one. Was it genetics or behaviorism or what that caused a personality such as the one that he developed. Bibliography: References The editors of Time Life Books (1993). Compulsion to Kill Crime library www.crimelibrary Word Count: 1243
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