¶ … psychological explanation for Ted Bundy's personality. It has 9 sources.
Theodore Robert Cowell commonly known as Ted Bundy is acknowledged to have been one of the most notorious serial killers in American history. The fascination he holds for the public and scholars alike arises from the fact that his deeds and his personality as it was known did not correspond. It is incomprehensible why an attractive, intelligent, man from a seemingly conventional background would feel the need to commit anywhere from 36 to 100 grisly murders (Simpson 2003).
Since then several attempts have been made to somehow explain Ted Bundy's motivations but as one of his biographers stated, his "mask of sanity" was impenetrable unless the inference was first made that he was a killer. Then various aspects of his personality and life could be made to fit. The fact that the conclusions still remained suspiciously flawed may stem from the fact that the whole truth may be missing. This includes the actual facts of his upbringing and origins and his perceptions. Most of the information is gathered from Bundy himself...and how reliable a source is that?
Bundy was a necrophile along with being a murderer. His victims were usually young, attractive women whom he accosted in a bid for assistance and then clubbed on the head with a crowbar. He would then rape, sodomize and torture his unconscious or comatose victims. He often kept the bodies or body parts for days, enjoying his 'possession' and control or dispose them and revisit the burial sites. This was Bundy's signature (Fadiman and Frager, 2002).
He executed these heinous acts while at the same time maintaining not one but two long-term and relatively loving relationships with mature and intelligent women, studying at law college, and dabbling in politics. He managed to be well-liked and even admired in this period of his life by the majority of people he communicated with. He was acknowledged to have an intelligent, funny, and assertive personality that both men and women found attractive. The question everyone wanted answered; was Ted Bundy a psychologically ill man or simply consciously bad?
To discover the answer a person inevitably explores his life history in search of a clue or nuance that would hint at the source of the forces that motivated him. They are difficult to discover in that though his birth was not absolutely typical it was not obviously traumatizing so as to explain the rage and mania that Bundy depicted. He was an illegitimate child born of an intelligent and otherwise conservative woman and an unknown man, perhaps the war veteran often implied. The fact remains he was ignorant of this until much later in life. A suspicious element in his life was his Grandfather, Samuel Cowell, who was deemed by many to be an aggressive and violently deranged man. There are however no explicit claims of abuse towards himself or his mother.
Bundy grew up knowing his grandparents as his parents and his mother as his sister; the convenient way the unwed yet pregnant status of his mother was handled in an era when single mothers were unheard of. He remembered these early days as an 'idyll' and resented and was confused by their move to Tacoma. From an early stage it is noted that Bundy was very sensitive to material things and appearances. He had a disdain for his new, bland and common surroundings and later for his unsophisticated southern stepfather. Ted conveyed feelings of deprivation in terms of social status and material possessions (Fadiman and Frager, 2002).
His feelings of inferiority when it came to matters of social interaction made him a withdrawn, reticent child with few friends or mentors all through highschool. He admitted to feelings of inadequacy due to his lack of athletic ability, and social etiquette. He had a minimal social life and no interaction with the opposite sex, in the sense of dates or affairs. Matters of sexual interaction that interested his peers were professedly incomprehensible to Bundy. This then was the boy that grew into a man who became the most wanted serial killer in America. Why?
Did this background contain enough sources of trauma to form an unconscious mind that could lead to the crimes Bundy carried out? It must have, at least in the beginning. Bundy was thought to be an otherwise intelligent man and interacted with society in a manner that did not raise suspicions of another persona in the most intelligent of minds. Not until that is, his crimes were proven unequivocally. In accordance to Freud's theory, Bundy's desires...
Meg Anders, who uses the alias of Elizabeth Kendall in her book entitled The Phantom Prince, provides an insider's look at Bundy's nature, the face he showed to the world and the occasional private tears he shed in her presence. Other books, such as True Crime, published by Time Warner, give an overview of the facts that have already appeared in numerous articles in the press. I do not include
Nonetheless, Bill never hurts other people simply because he thinks that it is irrational to hurt others. He thinks that any rational person would be like him and not hurt other people. Does Bill really understand that hurting others is morally wrong? (Nichols, 2002, p. 285)." This presents some interesting directions of thought. However, it is time to go into the relationship between serial murderers and forensic psychology as it
However, violence is only one possible manifestation of psychopathology (Gerrig & Zimbardo, 2009; Schmalleger, 2009). Individuals such as Bundy and Dahmer also represent the classic antisocial personality disorder which is not necessarily true of the vast majority of psychopaths, most of whom do not act out in criminally violent ways (Gerrig & Zimbardo, 2009. Schmalleger, 2009). In principle, what is most relevant about individuals like Bundy and Dahmer is not
The popular media's negative coverage of the insanity defense in contested cases when a defendant claims not to have the rational capacity to commit a crime or has a diminished capacity to conceptualize a criminal intent has caused the public to dismiss forensic psychiatry as providing rationalizations or excuses for bad behavior, rather than possessing a real scientific method. The use of the insanity defense is clearly subject to
The third conviction could serve as the third strike for California's anti-recidivism statute, thereby triggering a minimum 25-year sentence. Andrade was convicted of both counts of petty theft and was sentenced to two consecutive terms of 25 years to life in prison. After exhausting his appeals in the California legal system, Andrade filed a petition for habeas corpus, arguing his sentence violated the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and
Evaluation of a Hollywood PsychopathSummary of the Film SplitSplit opens with the abduction of three girls by Kevin. Kevin is not really in possession of himself, however: he has multiple personality disorder and the personality of Dennis is the one doing the kidnapping. There are other personalities that manifest themselves during his sessions of therapy, but for the most part these personalities are able to convince the doctor that they
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