“Tender Murderer”: A Psychoanalytic Reading of Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer in Thom Gunn’s Boss Cupid

Abstract

This article examines Thom Gunn’s poem “Troubadour,” in his final collection Boss Cupid (2000), containing five songs “Hitch-hiker,” “Iron Man,” “The Visible Man,” “A Borrowed Man,” and “Final Song”, all of which are sung by the infamous serial killer, Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer. Gunn’s study of Dahmer, evoking compassion, furnishes a murderer who performs his own role of “troubadour” while singing his intense feelings and aberrant actions from his own voice in a romantic mode. This act of speaking for himself highlights a strong sense of self-awareness and renders a murderer who is cognizant of his miserable situation. Thus, the poet’s treatment is with a particular empathy for such all-consuming sexual passion through an act of romanticizing the killer’s horrendous ways of murdering. Based on the poet’s lack of prejudice towards any propensities and his courage of going against the poetic conventionalities in his time, this study explores Gunn’s portrayal of Dahmer as a ‘tender murderer’, a desperate intimacy seeker victimized by his damaged psyche, thereby having sexual gratification in killing, the only way to stop his partner from leaving him. While the article engages with the phases of Dahmer’s homicidal acts operating on tender feelings in these songs, it does so through Jacques Lacan’s theories of the psyche with its three diagnostic structures: Neurosis, Psychosis, and Perversion. Two of these fundamental categories of diagnosis will be utilized to define particular symptoms, which cater to reading the tender murderer’s motive(s).