DAHMER

DAHMER 

Monsters lurk everywhere in the world and it’s hard to spot them. They have learned to camouflage themselves in the darkness, it engulfs and consumes them, blackening their souls turning them into shadows. Analytical Psychologist Carl Jung explains that human beings carry within themselves both elements of the good and bad, that we are both angels and demons, sick, demented, evil, dark, spoiled. Because we live in a world where we have to co-exist to survive, we surpress these undesirable qualities relegating them into the shadows. Unchecked the shadow can grow to consume our personality and rule our subconscious minds enabling us to act unconsciously. Our shadows can turn us into psychopaths who lack empathy and thrive on destruction. The shadow can enable the individual to be narcissistic, egotistical and maniacal. Shedding a light on our dark sides helps in controlling the shadow. Acknowledging you have a dark side keeps the shadow at bay. Life is a balance of both the good and bad, of the light and the darkness. We are both polar extremes of the same spectrum. You are a killer and a murderer, human nature says you are. You might find pleasure in murdering your brother in cold blood. Cain certainly did when he murdered his brother Able to spite God. The murder was premeditated, he felt no remorse, the action liberated him. I know I am bad, I am capable of savagery and genocide. I may even take pleasure in torturing and tormenting you to appease my dark side. Your suffering might even give me comfort. Am I another Jeffrey Dahmer? Would I drug you, strangle you to death, masterbate over your body, have sex with your unconscious body, dissect and sever your body parts, skin the flesh from your bones, cook and eat your body parts for dinner? The capacity for evil in a human being is unfathomable. Maybe I am not familiar with my own darkness. I don’t know what I might do to you in the right circumstances. The story of Jeffrey Dahmer haunts me because he did it time and time again. A serial killer with a death toll of 17. No one was safe, from boys aged 14 to adults aged 33. He butchered his victims, cut off their limbs, drilled holes in their skulls and injected hydrochloric acid, severed their heads and preserved them in the refrigerator, inserted the bones in the oven to burn them and then crushed them with his sledgehammer, he cut his victims into pieces and then boiled them, he cooked his victims and he ate them, he ate them! He used acid and other chemicals to burn the skin of his victims skulls to preserve them. He bleached the skulls and if they were too weak he pulverized them, some he kept and used when he was masterbating. He felt no remorse, it was a compulsion for him, he was conscious of his actions, he knew what he was doing, he wasn’t crazy or diagnosed with some sort of mental illness, he consciously experimented with his victims bodies in his own words to create zombies, he loved doing it, it was his vocation. I don’t want to believe that I am as wicked and evil as Dahmer but I know it’s possible. To deny this is to repress my own darkness and wickedness. To know I am capable of such darkness frightens me. I hope Jung and Freud have an answer for somebody like Dahmer. Maybe it is the ID out of control. Sigmund Freud explained that the ID is the seat of both the repressed material and the drives, to which had been added to the unconscious fantasies and unconscious feelings, notably guilt feelings. Expanding on this idea, Freud states that the mind is divided into 3; into what we call the ID, Ego and the Superego. The Superego is the watchful, judging, punishing agency in the individual. The ID is self-gratifying and amoral and the Ego is the middle ground of the two and strives to be moral. I don’t think Freud and Jung would understand an individual quite as complicated as Dahmer, to try and understand somebody like Dahmer is impossible. I mean he seduced and lured his victims to his place, drugged them, killed them, cut them and sat with the stench of their decomposing bodies. The smell was second nature to him. Sometimes psychology is not enough, perhaps this is a genetic thing, maybe he's the exception in the family tree. When he was finally caught he didn’t resist, he was compliant and told the whole truth, every horrific detail, where he hid body parts, how many he had killed, the hearts, biceps, legs he ate, when the killing spree commenced – everything. He knew what he had done was evil and he asked for the death penalty that was not granted because it was banned in his State. He was accepting of who he was, he was not bothered, he was not haunted by ghosts and demons, he was not remorseful, he even had fans who corresponded with him in jail, fans who projected onto him their undesirable feelings, desires and fantasies and he reciprocated back that energy. Jeffrey Dahmer is your definitive example of a monster, he scares me. Maybe I am just scared of myself.