From Right to Left it Had No End: Manifestations Of Intrinsic Psychopathology

The actions of serial murderers from a behavioral approach - looks at behaviors that can be observed rather than the individual’s internal workings, moreover, “only individuals can observe their perceptions and feelings, but someone else can observe your actions.” Consequently, it seems more reasonable to consider crime scene actions as experiences of behavior rather than particular manifestations of intrinsic psychopathology. The behavioral approach to classifying serial murderers’ actions suggests that an individual’s actions are the result of interaction between personality characteristics and the social and physical conditions of the situation. An inductive behavioral approach to modeling serial murderers sees behavior as mostly being consistent across a number of situations rather than specific to a particular environmental context. By employing the inductive behavioral approach, trends in how serial murderers behave from one crime to the next can be explored. Researchers often assume that personality traits are consistent, so that an offender can be characterized according to enduring personality characteristics. However, individuals are not uniformly rewarded across different crimes. 

The offender may learn to discriminate between contexts in which certain behavior is appropriate and those in which it is not. Rather, aggressive actions are differentially rewarded, and learned discriminations determine the situations in which the individual will display a particular behavior. This suggests that diverse behaviors do not necessarily reflect variations of the same underlying motive but often are discrete responses to different situations. Therefore, a behavioral classification model of serial murder may be more representative of serial murderers at large than a model developed from personality traits.

 

The theories on which the FBI serial murder classification is built are rather perplexing. First, there is the clinical classification which sees differences in offenders rather than crimes. These classification typologies seem to paint a picture of the offenders’ mental illnesses, rather than trying to distinguish between their crimes. Here, motive is thought to be some form of anger or rage towards society or a targeted group of individuals, and the offender harbors his emotional reactions to the point where they explode. These trends may be explained in terms of displacement of anger from other targets, or the feeling of lack of power. There is the motivational classification that suggests that the internal forces or predispositions that drive a sadistic killer to murder repeatedly are mental representations of vicarious gratifications. In other words, the murderer, who has no conscious emotion, is driven by thoughts and fantasies. 

This perspective is usually derived by relying on self-reports of serial murderers to classify the offender’s mental state, and in turn to classify crime scenes. However, the FBI profilers suggest that the sadistic serial killer is influenced by a continual fantasy. The problem with this form of deductive reasoning is that motives are inferred and are assumed to be related to intrinsic thoughts and mental illness, and the exploration of behavior is totally neglected. Not surprisingly, in a recent study of different profiling approaches, thus, the validity and utility of diagnostic evaluations and profiles developed from crime scene analysis. They concluded that the “majority of profiles are mildly to severely flawed. ”Other approaches to profiling serial murderers appear to be not much better. Given this, it might be more productive to adopt an approach that focuses more on behavior.

 

 

The actions are characterized by forceful aggression and intimidation. In the power-assertive rape-murder, the homicide becomes one of maintaining control over a vulnerable victim, and the killer demonstrates mastery of the situation by taking charge by the use of an assertive image and dominating violence. The power-reassurance rape-murderer is described as rape that is planned followed by an unplanned overkill of the victim. In this type of sexual murder, the killer is motivated by an “idealized seduction and conquest fantasy.”  This type of killer expresses his sexual competence through seduction and when that fails, the murder allows the offender to reintroduce the fantasy system. The anger-retaliatory rape-murder is where the rape is planned and the initial murder involves overkill. This type of offender murders for purposes of retaliation, getting revenge on women due to poor past relationships with women. The final type of sexual murder is the anger-excitation rape-murder, where both the sexual assault and murder are planned for the purpose of inflicting pain and terror on the victim for personal gratification. This type of murder involves sadistic acts precipitated by highly specialized fantasies.

 

Therefore, the classification scheme makes little distinction between the overt crime scene behavior as it occurs in murder and the psycho-dynamic processes that produce that behavior. There is little attempt to differentiate aspects of the offender’s motivations and life-style from aspects of his offending behavior. Any attempt to understand the actions that occur in murder offenses requires the classification of offense behavior as distinct from classification of the offender in either psychological or sociological terms. There are also several unique weaknesses to sexual murder typology originally not found in the rape classification scheme. The typology gives no consideration for an offender who commits a completely random crime.

 

 

Acknowledgements:

www.aivd.nl    AIVD ©

Algemene Bestuursdienst – @Erik Akerboom ©

www.politie.nl  Politiekorpschef  @Janny Knol©

www.politie.nl WEB Politie - @Henk van Essen©

https://english.marechaussee.nl  Royal Netherlands Marechaussee    @Willem-Alexander King of the Netherlands©

PolitieAcademie - https://www.politieacademie.nl/en©

 Author: W.R. Łaskawiec ©

 

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