Analysing Dahmer

The series of documentaries and videos that have recently come out about Jeffrey Dahmer, a homosexual who became a serial killer—about whom I have written three posts this month and last month—allow me to present the trauma model of mental disorders for visitors to this site.

First of all, the trauma model is not taught in academia. One of the things that surprised me most when I discovered the Swiss writer Alice Miller at the turn of the century, is that in one of her books she said that there was not a single chair in any university in the world that looked at the mental havoc that abusive parents wreak on their offspring. Not a single one!

Picking up on what I said in my September post on Dahmer, that the human mind resembles what computer programmers say, society does an exhaustive analysis of Dahmer’s ‘garbage out’. It goes into infinite detail about all the grisly things he did to his victims. But the ‘garbage in’ is almost absent: an in-depth analysis of Dahmer’s childhood and early adolescence in the context of family dynamics.

Lionel Dahmer and Jeffrey Dahmer

In this video, for example, four professionals analyse Dahmer’s mind and his father. Both were interviewed in prison after Dahmer had been sentenced. Interestingly, these professionals, who study serial killers, agreed that the father’s role aroused strong suspicions. But what the commenters said in the comments section of that video was more interesting than what the professionals said. Here is a sample of what six commenters had to say about the interview:

Commenter 1: I’ve never met a gay person who wasn’t abused or neglected as a child, myself included. Literally not one. They usually try to minimize it, saying things like, “I had a mostly normal childhood.” But if you talk to them long enough, the truth will come out. It may be something they didn’t view as abuse, probably because they were raised by a narcissistic parent who told them over and over how good they had it.

Commenter 2: Notice how careful J Dahmer was to NOT say anything bad about dad. The very few times he said ANYTHING were brief and almost vague. Imagine how much more difficult it is for a child to tell his feelings to abusive parents… Even interviewers were more interested in the gore that J Dahmer had created and ad revenues this gore tale would bring from increased viewership, but nothing about J Dahmer’s feelings from childhood through the current moment.

Commenter 3: You can see in the interview his dad is still controlling him.

Commenter 4: Yup! Very sad!

Commenter 5: I don’t get why so many people are convinced that Lionel abused sexually his son. Who said it? It looks like people want to find the simplest explanation for Dahmer’s homicidal behaviour, and sexual abuse is supposed to explain everything that went wrong in life.

Dahmer’s father was indeed guilty, but I doubt that he was guilty of direct abuse. Probably, he was guilty of neglect of his son. Remember that he was an old-fashioned fella. He was raised to believe that nurturing the newborn is only a mother’s responsibility. He was for breadwinning, she was for raising the kids. Many men of his generation never even changed the diaper or held their baby, it was considered strictly a mother’s task…

There is a whole theory about forming an attachment and the importance for a newborn to bond with their primary caretaker (usually it is the mother, but it can be any other figure). In the case of Dahmer, the bonding didn’t occur. His mother was unable or disinterested in bonding with her son and the father was also not there. Sometimes mothers have difficulty [in] bonding…

Some mothers have mental health issues, postpartum depression or psychosis or some of them never wanted a child in the first place. For most kids, things are going fine; the bond with the mother is somehow created. The mother is their first object and due to this relationship, children are learning how to recognize their own needs, and emotions and how to communicate with the world. They trust their mother and gradually learn how to be a human, how to behave, and how their behaviour affects others around them.

Dahmer seemed to be completely devoid of this first primal socialization and he never caught up with his peers later in life. For him, his mother was the first non-reactive, distant object, with whom he had minimal human interaction. In a metaphorical sense, she was like an inanimated, robotic, aloof “thing”.

Dahmer later in life treated his victims the same as his parents treated him: as if they were things without needs, emotions and self. He drugged victims to unconsciousness, so they were reduced to inanimate bodies and he cut them open as if they were, for example, clocks, cars or computers and he was a mechanic.

There are people severely neglected in early childhood. Fortunately, not all of them turn up to be serial killers, but many of them suffer from reactive attachment disorder that later can lead to conduct disorder in teenage years, and after that, it can lead to antisocial personality disorder if a child is not treated and fails to form a healthy relationship with parents…

What made Dahmer “special” was his extremely rare paraphilia that he developed and his lack of inhibition due to alcohol consumption. He was also a sex addict. He talked a lot about compulsions. Nevertheless, [he was] a severely disturbed individual, stuck in a very early developmental state his whole life.

Commenter 6: The Father knew mom was on 27 different pills during her pregnancy. Father left Dahmer alone with her more and more—he begged his father not to leave him with her. You guys need to look closer. It would be fascinating.

Although Dahmer repressed the causes of his pathology, he didn’t repress it completely—not even in the interview at his father’s side. Shortly before 1:07 and after 1:15 in the video linked above he said that the lack of control he experienced as a child and in his early teens was mixed with his emerging sexuality. In other words, being at the mercy of some unmentioned adults in his childhood and adolescence, presumably rabid impotence, eventually got displaced into surrogates where Dahmer avenged his pent-up rage.

I have said that no university dares to teach the havoc that abusive parents wreak on the minds of their children. So-called mental health professionals are as clueless as celebrity Youtuber David Rubin, who is ‘married’ to a man and the couple have adopted a baby to raise as a son.

Yesterday I saw an interview in which an Australian Youtuber interviewed this homosexual. Rubin said that the Woke Monster was mysteriously spawned in 2015. He doesn’t even realise that he is part of the Woke psychosis with the fight for so-called gay marriage and the aberration of two men raising a baby as their child. I mention the Rubin case because it is analogous to the utter lack of insight, empathy and compassion of so-called mental health professionals when it comes to the basic aetiology of another kind of monster, such as the compulsion that drives the serial killer.

In one of the revelations that came out in the Dahmer interview with his father by his side, I was able to empathise with Jeff. Shortly before 1:17, the father asked his son when he realised that one is solely responsible for one’s actions. The father always wanted to exonerate himself from his son’s monstrous pathology, even in the book he wrote. Jeff replied that it was when his father had sent him books on the (pseudo-science) of creationism, which (supposedly) refutes Darwinism.

I can empathise with Jeff because I know how a parent can literally programme his child’s mind on religious matters. What the adult Jeff believed about the fundamentalist pseudo-science called creationism parallels what I believed at the age Jeff was when he was interviewed with his father.

As I confess in the entry ‘Introjection’, my father had drummed into me the idea that the so-called Shroud of Turin was the cloth that enveloped Jesus’ body before his Resurrection. Unlike Jeff, over the years I was able to work out an antivirus of the mind that disabused me. Although only those who know my autobiography will understand the details, on this page I mention some of the cognitive steps in my struggle against the parental introject about Turin shroud. Although the pseudoscience of creationism isn’t the same as the pseudoscience that Christian apologists proclaim about the shroud, the aetiology of the pathology of believing in both pseudosciences is the same: parental introjects that are almost impossible to get out of one’s head.

There is much I could say about the trauma model, but the subject is huge. And I find it dismaying that what Alice Miller (1923-2010) said continues to this day: the mental havoc wreaked by parents on their children is not studied at any university. One has to read the writings of independent authors.