Jeff’s hernia operation

On 19 March of 1964 Jeffrey had his double hernia operation. It’s quite a heavy operation, even on an adult, so for a child it could be really traumatic.
Jeff remembers being in the hospital before the surgery and he watched “Bewitched” with several other kids. When Jeff recovered from the anesthesia he was having intense pain in the groin. According to Lionel, his dad, Jeff asked his mother if they cut off his penis. We don’t know what his mom told him and it’s something to think about how much they did to prepare little Jeffrey for such an intense surgery. As an adult and 27 years after the surgery, Jeff told Dr Judith Becker that the pain was so great he thought his genitals must have been cut off.

According to several studies it’s a fact surgery at young age has a high risk at developing traumatic stress reactions. Several other risk factors have been identified, which may guide services in screening those who may be most at risk. These include cases where:

• the family are lacking in social support
• the child is in the hospital for a longer period
• or a parent is suffering with mental health difficulties or high levels of stress.

Joyce, his mom, wrote in her diary that “Jeff was so good in the hospital but he really disliked the doctor after this ordeal.” According to the Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer, his mom spent as much time as she could with him. At night, Jeff would say to her “You can go home now, mommy. I’ll sleep.”

The pain lasted about a week. He never forget it. Brian Masters wonders, in view of Jeff’s later disturbance and its manifestation, whether this operation was perhaps disproportionately significant in his life. The deep cut in a sensitive area, the exploration of his inside, the feeling that foreign hands were invading his privacy would all find uncomfortable echoes at a later date.
Personally, I think this surgery triggered the start of Jeff’s splanchnophilia.

These uncomfortable echoes could be Jeff’s fascination with “wanting to know how the insides worked”. This started with dissecting roadkill but in a way he also did this later in his life with his victims. About cutting open Jeff’s first victim, Steven Hicks, The Shrine says “In a cruel pitiful echo of the experiments with roadkill, he slit open the belly to see what it looked like inside.” At this point it wasn’t sexual to Jeff yet, more a morbid curiosty. But that would change.
He liked to listen to the noises the bodies made, he would open up his victims, cut off the genitals and he would even put his penis in the viscera to masturbate or rub the organs on his penis. On the polaroids Jeff took of his victims you can see the victims were positioned in a way to show off either their chest or the belly.

Another echo was his obsession with wanting control and complete dominance over a person. The surgery may have left young Jeff with the feeling of being violated. Somebody has touched him, caused him pain in his private area. He felt he had no control over it. Some even think Jeff wasn’t completely sedated by the anesthesia. This would only be a bigger reason for him to feel he had no control over his own life, over what was happening to his body. He made sure later in life that would not happen again. He would be in control even if that meant drugging a person and killing them.

In the Shrine it says: “Suddenly his embryonic autonomy is shattered by a rude invasion; his little powers of decision are roughly withdrawn and he becomes an object in the hands of strangers. His ability to maintain control is undermined, disregarded even perhaps canceled. He experiences ‘loss of control, autonomy and competence’ And he does not know why. Not knowing why, he will wonder and invent. His capacity to handle his emotional reactions to trauma and threat when alone is still very insecure, and his understanding of this, his body, how it works and what one may do with it, is tiny.
Jeff Dahmer’s own imaginings about the insides of people’s bodies began with his hernia operation and the intrusion into his. Control was something lost in infancy and never recovered. With his victims he at last placed himself in the position where he could control not only what happened to them but what happened to their bodies. He could handle their intestines as his had been handled, cut them in the same place as he had been cut, restore himself of that autonomy of which he had been robbed, by stealing theirs. The tactile intimacy of the operation had at the same time mingled the feeling of sexual privilege with that of corporal invasion, which is why he chose to regain control and restore his stolen potency not with his enemies, not through hatred but with a loved object. The combination was disastrous.”

Lionel recalls the operation like this:
“One day in spring of 1964, Jeff began to complain about an area of tenderness in his groin area. This tenderness worsened, and a small bulge appeared in his scrotum. We took him to the doctor right away, and he was subsequently diagnosed as suffering from a double hernia. The doctor explained that the hernia was the result of a birth defect, and that surgery was necessary to correct the problem. Surgery was scheduled for the following week and while Joyce and I stood by, Jeff selected the ragged floppy eared dog he’d slept with since the age of 2 as the stuffed animal he wished to accompany him to the hospital. The operation was performed shortly after and when it was over Jeff was taken to his room, where he remained sedated for several hours. When he awoke, of course, it was to a great deal of pain.
So much pain, I learned later, that he asked Joyce if the doctors had cut off his penis. He remained in the hospital for several days and even after he returned home, his recovery seemed to move forward slowly. For long hours, he remained on the sofa in the living room, his body wrapped in a large, checkered bathrobe. During that period, he moved slowly, ponderously, like an old man. The ebullience which had marked his childhood, his buoyancy and energy drained away. During any period of recovery, of course, a certain flattening of mood could be expected. But in Jeff this flattening began to take on a sense of something permanent. He seemed smaller, somehow more vulnerable, perhaps even sadder than at any time before.”

So I think it’s safe to say his hernia operation had a significant impact on his mental state as a child and later in life. I’m not saying this is the reason why he became a serial killer. But I do think it played a bigger part in it than most people know or realise. And it suprises me how little it is mentioned or taken in consideration in his case. The Shrine continues to come back to it during the story Brian writes but in all the other books I don’t even remember it getting attention, maybe only mentioned briefly.

Sources used:
– The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer by Brian Masters
– A Father’s Story by Lionel Dahmer