Jeffrey Dahmer Essay

351 Words2 Pages
If Sigmund Freud were to witness the crimes that Jeffrey Dahmer committed, he would come to the conclusion that Dahmer's id was unusually strong. He might even say that Dahmer’s id was so strong that it completely overpowered his superego, which was either weak or not fully developed, and lost his ability to decide right from wrong to his radical sexual urges. The first defense mechanism that Dahmer used to ease his anxieties was repression, which is keeping distressing thoughts and feelings buried in the unconscious. When Dahmer moved to three different houses in his childhood, he suppressed his bitter emotions and went from an outgoing, exuberant child to a shy, quiet, and socially awkward child, only playing with his dog who was his best friend. The second defense mechanism that Dahmer used to ease his anxieties was sublimation, which is working off unmet desires, or unacceptable impulses, in activities that are socially approved. Dahmer enlisted in the army after high school to work in the army hospital to fulfill his want and desires to handle and manipulate parts of the human body. The third defense mechanism that Dahmer used was displacement, which is diverting emotional feelings from their original source to a substitute target. On one specific occasion when his mother and brother left him in their house alone, Dahmer went out and took out his stress and anxieties on a random hitchhiker by killing him. Freud would claim that Dahmer was fixated in his phallic stage when he gave his dad the birthday card. Although he was sending a nice message to his father, the last line of the verse that says “I love you to death” shows hostility towards his dad. This is known as the Oedipal complex, where children manifest erotically tinged desires for their opposite-sex parent, accompanied by feelings of hostility toward their same-sex parent. Dahmer’s Oedipal
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