Hello everyone, I know the question can seem vague so I’ll elaborate.
I’m not a big expert, I’m passionate about the psychology of the serial killer phenomenon and I read/watched documentaries about Bundy, Gacy, Zodiac, Dahmer and some other less famous.
My question is more about the psychology than the facts themselves, and it is:
What causes the association between sexual arousal and violence?
As far as I know , often serial killers decide to kill in order to live a fantasy they have had for a long time. Furthermore, in the 70s the so called detective magazines were pretty common and they depicted images of murder/corpses in a sexualised way.
As a neurotypical person I’m trying to understand how your mind begins to associate something that excites you (for example a naked body of a woman or a man) with the idea of destroying, making suffer, violate them. The “normal” process would be to avoid those thoughts, instead in these cases they are a trigger. So how do you think this connection is made in those minds? Thank you.
Is there any explanation for most notorious serial killers to have so many sexual disorders? Pedophilia, necrophilia, desire for rape, etc.
A vast majority of serial killers have this urge, almost a compulsion to commit murder and I've always wondered what makes them have that compulsion, to such an extent in which they literally can't suppress them and keep on killing until they are caught or killed.
Bundy, Gacy, Ramirez, DeAngelo, Dahmer and even lesser known figures like Hilton or Keyes all apparently had these urges to kill and couldn't suppress them. Has there ever been any explanation for why a person has a compulsion to commit such atrocity? I understand all serial killers are psychopaths, but not every psychopath is a cold-blooded killer, so that cannot possibly be it. And some serial killers didn't have abusive childhoods either, it's to my understanding that people like Israel Keyes and Jeffrey Dahmer, while they certainly had unordinary upbringings, were not abused as children, and they still turned out as sadistic murderers with apparently zero regard for human life. Are their brains just hard-wired wrong, or differently than ours? And why is the compulsion that they have murder, and not something else?
Let me know what you think in the replies.
I'm watching a show on Hulu called "phrogging" which is where a stranger breaks in someone's house and lives amongst them. In this one episode, there's a man who breaks into a family's house and has fantasies and even plans on preforming surgeries on them. This kind of makes me think of of others serial killer's weird obsessions that ultimately ended up being sexual and violent (which obviously the 'surgery' part IS violent) But I guess what I'm asking is, is there always some type of sexual gratification that comes from dark obsessive fantasies? Like is there always a sexual motive that comes with obsessive stalking or dark fantasies that don't necessarily seem sexual in the first place? I don't know. This reminded me of Ted Bundy's, Jeffrey Dahmers, John Wayne Gacey's, and other killers obsessions before it got to the violent point, they all kind of started with sexual motives.
No. There are many kinds of fantasies with different kinds of intentions. Not all pleasure is sexual and many serial killers have explicitly said torture and murder were better than sex and a different kind of pleasure altogether.
I think it starts with anger. Wanting to destroy things bc (in abuse situations) the child is subjected to twisted violence and injustice. When a child has no one to tell about the injustice and feels like violence is something that happens in private behind closed doors, secret violence like that takes on a life of its own in the child's mind. And, without anyone to steer them towards healthy, normal activities, the fascination with death and violence becomes more and more part of how the child explores the world.
Take for example a child that excels at sports. They might spend hours outside practicing basketball skills and then interacting with other kids using their athletic skills. A talented athletic child explores the world through the lens of sports.
Now, take for an example, a child that is not supported nor encouraged in any way. The only interaction the child has is getting beat up by their parents behind closed doors. Let's say that the parents have extreme punishments and do weird things to the child behind closed doors. The child will be filled with rage. It won't understand that people have a right to physical autonomy and safety. And it won't have n aversion to anger and violence like other children have. And, in an attempt to understand it's world and understand their parents' violence towards them, the child will start exploring violence and anger as a theme in their play. It is natural for children to fantasize. It is natural for children to even play act kissing or other interpersonal behaviors. For a child that lives with violence, play acting and fantasizing about being violent towards others is the same as a little girl playing with dolls and making them kiss. It's normal human behavior for children to develop playful fantasies that imitate the themes in their life.
And while a little girl might go from playing with dolls and doing their dolls' hair to doing their own hair and talking about what boys are cute, a child that is subjected to violence might go from smashing toys to smashing frogs and small animals. It's totally natural for a child to develop on a trajectory that helps them to understand the things they are experiencing in their home life. Something as simple as whipping a child with a stick and forcing them to bed without dinner every night can create a child that is fascinated with interacting in extreme violence. The punishment of depriving the child interaction AND food after a violent episode of getting hit leaves the child alone in their trauma with raging adrenaline and cortisol- anger inducing hormones. Anger becomes the child's world. It becomes who their real identity is when they are alone. When they say a child was raised in the depths of hell, sometimes they mean that the child's anger and hatred were stimulated in absence of any kind of positive parenting.
Most of the serial killers committed their crimes because of neglect or abuse in their childhood , I don't know much about phycology so i wanted to ask you why it turns to a sexual need to control people they're attracted to ? What does sex have to do with what happened to them in their childhood ?
Sorry if it's a stupid question but i really don't have any idea
