Jeffrey Dahmer: A Serial Killer

Jeffrey Dahmer is considered on the worst serial killers of the 20th century and needed a highly differential treatment while in prison, and later had been killed in prison by his cell mate (Strubel, 2007). On May 21, 1960, Jeffrey Dahmer was born to his chemist father and mother. His mother had difficulties during her pregnancy and had been prescribed tranquilizers, which later caused Jeffrey to suffer from nausea, anxiety and dysphoria (Silva, Ferrari and Leong, 2002). Jeffrey Dahmer had suffered from multiple paraphilias, depression, substance abuse, Asperger Syndrome, personality disorder, and social interaction delays (Strubel, 2007).

I believe that Jeffrey came from the average family with the common dysfunctions that result in childhood

He made superficial contact with others but was isolative to his family and peers. When he was 15 his father described him as a child who had rejected all efforts to develop interests in the world that his father attempted to introduce (Silva et al, 2002).

Jeffrey had developed compulsive masturbation by the time he reached adolescence. Concerning his psychosexual history as an adult, he exposed himself in a sexual manner to adults and minors who reported he masturbated in public, a behavior that eventually led to legal difficulties. He was engaged in sexual intercourse and involvement in other sexual behaviors with the cadavers of his victims led sexual mental health professionals to diagnose him with necrophilia (Silva et al., 2002).

However, a decisive difference between his childhood and early adolescence and his later life is the fact that he sexualized his fixated activity on bodies and bodily parts, thereby endowing them with not only existential meaning but sexual satisfaction. As he suffered from necrophilia with interests in the internal anatomy of the human body and one that viewed the ideal sexual object as a function of “an intimate relationship with an admirable and beautiful thing” (Silva et al.,

He stated that, “It became a compulsion and it switched from animals to humans. I still don’t understand it. I don’t know why,” (Higgs, 2012). Strubel (2009) shared how the investigation of Dahmer’s apartment turned out. There had been police findings of skulls and body parts which were preserved in formaldehyde and in the refrigerator. There was also a devoted scrapbook of his dead victims that were posing in dismemberment ways. This was later to explain Dahmer’s behavior of masturbatioral emissions while staring at the skulls and photos Strubel