The 3 elements are bed wetter, fire setters and animal killers. It was known as the MacDonald Triangle, which had a triad of homicidal personality. J.M MacDonald a forensic psychologist in 1960’s, came up with the idea that there are 3 behavioral aspects that serial killers exhibit in their childhood. Alcoholism, disturbed family, odd socialization ways, family violence. There is a long history of psychological problems and criminal behaviors. Multiple researches have shown that they experience a lot of psychological, physical and sexual abuse in their childhood.
It was also observed that there was an absence of father influence in the developmental years and there was disgust for the dominant mother image, which later in their lives was taken out on other women. They came from homes where they saw dominant fathers or mothers or absent mothers or fathers. It was seen that most of the serial killers had a disturbed childhood and came from broken families. There were various aspects like childhood, family dynamics, and relationship of parents. What were the commonalities in all the serial killers? And what motivated them?, were some questions for which the unit worked and discovered various details. The first psychological profiling unit was led by Patrick Mullany and Howard Teten. Federal Bureau of Investigation established a psychological profiling in their set of tools in 1970’s, in order to catch the killers. As there was an increase in numbers of serial killers, criminologists and forensic psychologists began searching for some key aspects to look deeper into the complicated psyche of serial killers. The feelings of remorse and inability to think about it in any ways and at the same time receive pleasure and gratification out of it, are rewarding for them. There are combinations of many things and reasons why someone end up being like that. One can think that it results of a traumatic childhood, adulthood experiences or some tendencies that were always there. It is to be taken in consideration that not only one aspect can be blamed entirely for exhibiting a behavior of a serial killer in most of the cases it’s both the result of nature and nurture. Nurture refers to the aspects related to outer world, environment, experiences, perceptions, cognitions and so on. Nature refers to the internal aspects like the genetics, vulnerabilities inherited and biological factors. While studying a serial killer or criminal, this question plays an important role as there are various external and internal factors that contribute in forcing a person to become someone who is capable of doing things of extreme atrocity. Likewise, the biggest question in psychology is that whether the human behavior and actions are consequences of nature or nurture. Serial killers can be differentiated on the type of murder they commit, its degree of extremity and number of people that they have killed. According to American Psychological Association, a serial killer is an individual who repeatedly commits murder, typically with a distinct pattern in the selection of victims, location, and methods. If we look at the origin of the term serial killer, it was coined by Robert Resseler who was an FBI agent and an author. But when it comes to serial killers, it becomes a more complex riddle which requires a lot of time and energy. In general, it is a sophisticated task to understand the human mind and behaviors. These are some really big questions that have led psychologists to look for the answers again and again. What is the difference? What do they think and feel before doing it? What do they feel after doing it? Most importantly, how they started doing all this. For some, it can be very difficult to even imagine all this, but for some it’s just a simple task. Rapes, torturing before killing, strangling, mutilating and what not they are just few of the horrific things that people have done. Till date it is possible that we might have heard about few people and cases that might have impacted us, made us think and question and we could feel chills running down though our spines when we first heard about those heinous crimes.
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