Jeffrey Dahmer: An American Serial Killer

Jeffrey Dahmer was called the Milwaukee Cannibal and was an American serial killer. Although he was a fairly lonely person who kept to himself and avoided other children, he also liked attention. He gained it from his school mates by clowning, pulling faces as if he was mentally ill, and flapping his arms like a comic Frankenstein monster. He would drift away from his own personality and become someone who he imagined others saw him as. This is a true illustration of Cooley’s looking glass self. He changed his nature and behaviour to someone he was not, becoming a person he thought others perceived him to be. Dahmer was not actually an extrovert but acted in a way he assumed others viewed him (H.S Stuttman, 1994).

Moreover, Dahmer was fascinated

Dahmer was curious about the insides of these animals, and would skin and dissect them before burying them in an animal graveyard. He mounted their heads on pikes or kept them in preservative fluids (Cook, 2011). It is likely that Dahmer tortured and killed many animals. This represents one of the behavioural characteristics of the Macdonald triad which was harming animals. This characteristic that Dahmer possessed was a warning sign of his potential to grow into a serial killer. In Dahmer’s pre-teen years he would avoid interaction with many of his peers and he would spend most of his time in his own thoughts. He could be described as a gentle and quiet boy who was known as a melancholy loner. Additionally, he spent much of his time wandering in the woods. Dahmer proves Carl Jung’s idea of an introvert as he preferred the internal world of his own thoughts. He felt anxious and shy around others which deemed his personality as an introverted individual (H.S Stuttman, 1994). In 1978, Dahmer had briefly attended Ohio State University and during this time he was questioned by campus police about the theft of a watch, radio, and $120. He was the only suspect of the stolen items from another room in the Morrill Tower

Since Carlina and a group of her friends discovered him, he was caught and arrested. He refused to cooperate with authorities when he was taken in for police custody. He only ended up confessing when investigator Pastor Cordova Gudino went undercover as an inmate (Biography.com Editors, 2016). This demonstrates oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) in which an individual shows argumentative or defiant behavior against authority figures whilst refusing to comply to requests. This concludes that Lopez refused to comply to the police because by doing so he would feel powerless. By remaining defiant he retained a sense of power and control over the situation. Furthermore, after being kicked out of his house, Lopez was raped by a seemingly helpful pedophile and he soon began to show signs of having the personality disorder, paranoia. The feeling of being raped by someone he thought was good, resulted in his paranoid behavior towards strangers. He believed any passerby was out to get him and he was no longer safe. Thus, he went into hiding during the day and only came out at night to scavenge for food. He was traumatized by the events that had occurred in his life and he became fearful and cautious (Montaldo,