Dahmer Psychoanalysis Essay

381 Words2 Pages
Psychology psychoanalysis Jeffrey Dahmer’s habitual actions can be attributed to his childhood; his environment growing up was relatively normal and stable yet Dahmer’s horrific actions were merely a method of satisfying his twisted impulses and pleasuring his ID. For normal people they pass through Freud’s oral and anal stages, as well as overcome the Oedipal complex. In the case of Jeffrey Dahmer, his childhood instincts for obtaining pleasure were rather gross. Freud proposed that most young children experience their first sexual arousal from a parent of the opposite sex. This phase naturally passes when the child matures and begins to look towards other people for sexual pleasure. In Dahmer’s case, his initial childhood fantasies were predominantly violent. In order to satisfy his ID impulses, he needed to engage in violent behavior. As a child, he found satisfaction in examining road kill. The pleasure obtained from the dead animals served to satisfy his sexual drive and provide him with gratification. Dahmer became conditioned to associate death with pleasure, thus finding satisfaction and sexual gratification only by being in the presence of death. Throughout grade school, Dahmer remained an outcast. He could not associate with others because he received no sort of fulfillment from forming personal relationships or friendships. Soon after graduating high school, dead animals were losing his interest and he moved on and claimed his first victim. As an adult, Dahmer frequently tried to repress his fantasies. This is evidence that his superego was functioning to some extent because he was trying to conform to society’s standards. For example, after killing a man at the age of 18, the young Dahmer felt repulsed by his action and resorted to alcoholism to aid his repression.
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