American Psycho: Inside the Tortured Mind of Edward Gein - Essay Example

American Psycho: Inside the Tortured Mind of Edward Gein (A Study of the Psychology of Criminal Conduct) This paper examines crime anddeviance, looking at the different theories on what causes criminal behavior with the main focus on the family and childhood. The author pays particular attention to the case of Ed Gein, aka the “Plainfield ghoul”, exploring his childhood and linking it to his criminal behavior. Introduction Today, deviance and crime plague American society. There are vast degrees of deviance, from a simple shoplifter, to a car theft, to a killing machine with no conscience, otherwise known as the serial killer. But how is this killing machine created? Where and how does this type of criminal behavior begin? The answers to these questions must be addressed in order to stop the formation of this deviance. This paper will investigate the life of one of America’s most infamous criminal deviants, Edward Gein, to answer these questions. In the search for the answer, the question of nature vs. nurture is inevitably brought up. Scientists and psychologists have debated over whether a childs upbringing forms their behavior or whether they are born with a personality. Most scientists believe that biological dysfunctions and physical illnesses are the factors that bring on this type of deviance. Most psychologists will argue family, society, environment, and the media cause criminal behavior. Many factors contribute to this frightening deviance, but the root of criminal behavior lies in the home and the family structure of children. Section I The making of a deviant The “Big Four” Social science research on attitudes predicting behavior has been progressing rapidly in recent decades. Anti-social attitudes have been shown to be highly predictive of criminal and/or antisocial behavior. In their 1994 book, The Psychology of Criminal Conduct, researchers Don Andrews and James Bonta identify thinking patterns, in the form of anti-social attitudes and sentiments, as one of the “big four” in predicting criminal behavior. Not all offender risk factors are created equal. Some are more important than others. Andrews and Bonta proposed four factors that may be particularly important. For purposes of offender risk assessment, the theory indicates that, at the very minimum, we should assess criminal history, antisocial supports, antisocial thinking and antisocial personality. Not only are these variables important theoretically, but the research also shows that they are empirically important. Many variables suggested by the sociological and clinical theories are viewed as playing a minor role, and other factors are thrust to the forefront. Yes, poverty makes life extremely difficult and some may steal to escape economic hardships; however, many people who live in poverty do not steal. And yes, using illegal drugs may be a solution for some who feel overwhelmed by lifes stresses but the majority of such individuals search for non-criminal solutions to personal anguish. Consider also that there are offenders who come from financially stable backgrounds and lack significant mental health problems. A great deal more is needed to explain criminal conduct. Andrews and Bonta identify four sets of factors (the Big Four) which play a prominent role in the general personality and social psychological theory of criminal conduct. One of these factors borrows from the clinical perspective: antisocial personality. Antisocial personality is broadly defined and describes an individual who is impulsive, self-centered, and callous toward others and seeks excitement and self-gratifying pleasure. Other clinical variables (such as anxiety, self-esteem) do not play major roles. The second of the Big Four is derived from learning theory. If people are rewarded for a certain behavior, they will behave in that manner again. Behavior that is repeated many times not only suggests that there are numerous rewards associated with the behavior, but also that a behavioral habit has developed. In the absence of rewards, behavior with a lengthy history of reinforcement will continue. As is often said, the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. Antisocial personality and criminal history are two of the best predictors of criminal behavior. Antisocial personality was suggested by clinical theory, while criminal history was atheoretical (“dustbowl empiricism”). The two other important predictors, antisocial supports and antisocial thinking, find their theoretical “home” in the general personality and social psychological theory. This theory, like all social learning theories, places emphasis on learning within social groups. An individual learns criminal behaviors from watching and imitating the antisocial behavior of offenders and receiving their approval. Weird old Eddie …And then there is Eddie. Born at the turn of the century into the small farming community of Plainfield, Wisconsin, Gein lived a repressive and solitary life on his family homestead with an alcoholic father, a weak, ineffectual brother and a domineering mother who taught him from an early age that sex was a sinful thing. Eddie ran the familys 160-acre farm on the outskirts of Plainfield after his father George died in 1940, followed by the deaths of his brother Henry in 1944 and his mother Augusta in 1945. When she died her son was a thirty-nine-year-old bachelor, still emotionally enslaved to the woman who had tyrannized his life. “Weird old Eddie", as the local community knew him, began to develop a deeply unhealthy interest in the intimate anatomy of the female body - an interest that was fed by medical encyclopedias, books on anatomy, pulp horror novels and pornographic magazines. Soon he graduated on to the real thing by digging up decaying female corpses by night in far-flung Wisconsin cemeteries. These he would dissect and keep some parts: heads, sex organs, livers, hearts and intestines. Then he would flay the skin from the body, draping it over a tailors dummy or even wearing it himself to dance and mince around the homestead - a practice that apparently gave him intense gratification. On other occasions, Gein took only the body parts that particularly interested him. He was especially fascinated by the excised female genitalia, which he would fondle and play with, sometimes stuffing them into a pair of womens panties, which he would then wear around the house. Not surprisingly, he quickly became a recluse in the community, discouraging any visitors from coming near his by now neglected and decaying farm. Geins fascination with the female body eventually led him to seek out fresher samples. His victims, usually women of his mothers age, included 54-year old Mary Hogan, who disappeared from the tavern she ran in December 1954, and Bernice Worden, a woman in her late fifties who ran the local hardware store, who disappeared on 16 November 1957. Mrs. Wordens son Frank was also the sheriffs deputy, and upon learning that weird old Eddie Gein had been spotted in town on the day of his mothers disappearance, Frank Worden and the sheriff went to check out the old Gein place, already infamous amongst the local children as a haunted house. There, the gruesome evidence proved that Geins bizarre obsessions had finally exploded into murder, and much, much worse. In the woodshed was the naked, headless body of Bernice Worden, hanging upside down from a meat hook and slit open down the front. Her head and intestines were discovered in a box, and her heart on a plate in the dining room. The skins from ten human heads were found preserved, and another skin taken from the upper torso of a woman was rolled up on the floor. There was a belt fashioned from carved-off nipples, a chair upholstered in human skin, the crown of a skull used as a soup-bowl, flesh lampshades, a table propped up by human shinbones, and a refrigerator full of human organs. The four posts on Geins bed were topped with skulls and a human head hung on the wall alongside nine death-masks — the skinned faces of women. The stunned searchers also uncovered decorative bracelets made out of human skin, a shoebox full of female genitalia, faces stuffed with newspapers and mounted like hunting trophies on the walls, and a “mammary vest” flayed from the torso of a woman. Gein later confessed that he enjoyed dressing himself in this and other human-skin garments and pretending he was his own mother. The scattered remains of an estimated fifteen bodies were found at the farmhouse when Gein eventually was arrested, but he could not remember how many murders he had actually committed. In fact, he claimed to have killed only two women; the other bodies were corpses he had dug up at local cemeteries. After ten years in a mental hospital, Gein was judged competent to stand trial. Eddie was found guilty, but criminally insane. He was first committed to the Central State Hospital at Waupon, and then in 1978 he was moved to the Mendota Mental Health Institute It is said he was always a model prisoner: gentle, polite and discreet. He died of respiratory and heart failure due to cancer in Mendota’s geriatric ward in 1984, aged seventy-seven. (Schechter, 190-193) Section II The Ultimate Deviants Serial killers The Gein case created quite a sensation. Thousands of people drove to Plainfield to get a look at the ‘murder farm’.  Eventually the place was burned down by the Plainfield citizens as they regarded it as a place of evil. Before Gein’s death he had already been immortalized in the Alfred Hitchcock film, Psycho. Ed Gein was not a serial killer, in the strictest sense of the word: to be qualified as a serial killer, one must murder more than three victims, one at a time, in a relatively short time period. But his pathetic life and bizarre crimes created a model for future serial killers, as well as for at least two of horror cinema’s most sinister villains: Leatherface (Texas Chainsaw Massacre) and Buffalo Bill (Silence of the Lambs). Many things today confuse, yet enthrall the masses. War, murder, medical science, incredible rescue…And another topic has made into documentaries: the ultimate deviants, serial killers. People who commit multiple murders are of interest to the population, but what caused them to be this way? Researchers believe that childhood trauma, heavy drugs during the growing phase of life, as well as many other things have twisted the minds of men such as Jeffery Dahmer, Charles Manson, John Wayne Gacy, and David Berkowitz. Many say that their actions were not preventable but others believe that the warning signs were present and that their behavior could have been modified long before the murders began. The criminal mind One of the most controversial questions is “Are some children just born bad?” The earliest warning signs of serial killers can be traced back to their childhood. It is believed that the mind of a murderer is charged with a turbulence of emotions stored from early childhood (Abrahamsen 18). So a review of the case of Mary Bell, abused and unwanted child of a prostitute, would lead us to believe. Mary Bell was just 11 years old when she killed two toddlers and ransacked her school “for a giggle.” (Hornberger 21, 22) Most serial killers are victims of or bear witness to sadistic violence at a very early age. In most cases, the parental abuse is barbaric and it seems little wonder that a serial killer would come from such horrible squalor. Albert De Salvo — the “Boston Strangler” — came from a father who savagely beat his wife and children, and had sex with prostitutes in front of the entire family. As is evident in deSalvo’s case, and in other cases of extreme criminal deviancy, the future perpetrators felt they had no control over the horror of their lives. Killing the victim is a form of exerting unmitigated, absolute, and irreversible control over it. The victim is unlikely to run on him or vanish as earlier objects (e.g., Gein’s parents and brother) have done. The killer is trying desperately to avoid a painful relationship with his object of desire. He is terrified of being abandoned or humiliated, exposed for what he is and then discarded. Killers often have sex — the ultimate form of intimacy — with the corpses. Objectification and mutilation allow for unchallenged possession. In the majority of cases researched by the author, the murder ritual seemed to have recreated earlier conflicts with meaningful objects, such as parents, authority figures, or peers. The outcome of the replay is different to the original, though. This time, the killer dominates the situation. Summary Nature vs. nurture…natural born killer vs. the “my mother didn’t love me” defense…Which is correct? If who we are and what we do originates in the brain, then the structure of and the occurrences therein can explain for our entire catalogue of personalities and behaviors. However, what about deviant behavior and personalities? If deviation implies wrong or inaccurate behavior, is there something wrong or inaccurate in the brains of those who are deviant? How did they become so? Case studies of serial killers and other criminal deviants lead us to believe that the root of criminal behavior lies in the home and the family structure of children. References and further reading Andrews, D. A., & Bonta, J. (2003). The psychology of criminal conduct (3rd ed.). Cincinnati: Anderson Publishing. Blackburn, R. (1993). The psychology of criminal conduct: Theory, research, and practice. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons. Egger, S. A. (1998). The killers among us: An examination of serial murder and its investigation. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. Giannangelo, S. J. (1996). The psychopathology of serial murder: A theory of violence. Westport, CT: Praeger. Hickey, E. W. (1991). Serial murderers and their victims. Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks/Cole Publishing Co. Hornberger, Francine (2002). Mistresses of Mayhem: The Book of Women Criminals. Indianapolis: Alpha Books. Jones, V., & Collier, P. (1993). Serial killers and mass murderers (Vol. 2). Forestville, CA: Eclipse Books. Katz, J. (1988). Seductions of crime: Moral and sensual attractions in doing evil. New York: Basic Books. Norris, J. (1988). Serial killers. New York: Doubleday Books. Schechter, Harold (2003). The Serial Killer Files. New York: Ballantine Books. Read More