Wisdom Notes on Psychology

Serial Killers and their Motivations - 1

The links in the table on the left take you to sub-headings on this page.

The uniqueness of childhood trauma [¹] is that it instils self-pity and fear as regular emotions within the subconscious mind [²]. The self-pity creates a state of fragility in the child, a state which is not experienced by any child who has a normal childhood. Even with children who experience trauma, the intensity of it will vary, so that for some children the negative states of mind can be tolerable, whilst for others the negative states gradually become intolerable. It is when the negative states become intolerable that the child, and later when it becomes an adult, is likely to engage in harsh anti-social behaviours.

The quality of experience means that an adult who has not experienced childhood trauma will not be able to understand a child who has experienced it. To put this view another way, any person who is not fragile will not be able to understand another person who is fragile.

Fragility is the precondition for a person turning into a victimiser of strangers, by being either a serial killer or a serial rapist.

The Importance of Subconscious Envy

Sigmund Freud postulated the existence of a death instinct. This exists, but not in the way that he thought. The “death instinct” is actually the intense influence of subconscious envy. When envy acts at a subconscious level, it can become the most destructive of all emotions, worse in its influence than hatred or resentment or bitterness.

One destructive influence of subconscious envy is to reject the sense of having a personal identity, thus making it easier to desire becoming an impersonal slave [³]. In other words, that having a personal identity is meaningless. Another destructive influence is that it supports a nihilistic belief in world-denial, that the world is meaningless [4]. These are influences focused on the person’s subjectivity. If subconscious envy turns outwards, then it can support the desire to harm and destroy other people.

Sociopath versus Psychopath

In criminal profiling, one important distinction is that some killers are organised (meaning that their method of murdering is organised), whilst others are disorganised. In order to explain this division, I use the terms “sociopath” and “psychopath”. In standard textbooks these terms are more or less interchangeable. Now I give them separate meanings. Therefore I use these terms in a different way from other writers.

In my usage of these terms, they have common factors of envy, fear and hate. In addition, resentment and bitterness are often present. The difference between the two terms depends on whether the fear or the hate is emphasised. The presence of hate is the reason that the killer appears to have no social conscience. Many writers comment that in a courtroom when a killer is being tried for his murders he often shows no sign of emotion. This is not correct. Everybody is always experiencing emotions, from the time they are born to the time they die. What confuses observers is that the apparent lack of emotion is due to the killer having hatred as the foremost emotion in his current state of mind. Hate produces a much cooler state of mind than anger or resentment; such coolness may easily be mistaken for a mild sense of peace.

In my view, the emotional roots of sociopathic and psychopathic behaviours are:

• Sociopath

The roots are resentment plus hatred of society.
Envy and fear are lesser influences in the background. Hatred is emphasised.

• Psychopath

The roots are bitterness plus fear of society.
Envy and hate are lesser influences in the background. Fear is emphasised.

• Organised and Dis-organised Killers

A common feature of serial killing is that a killer may be classified as either an organised killer or a dis-organised killer. The difference between them is the difference between hatred and fear.

Hatred enables a person to function with control and organisation, whilst fear often moves a person beyond his ability to control himself. Fear has the effect of disorganising the thinking processes. What does this disorganisation mean in terms of violence?  It can turn the person into a walking volcano of fear, resentment and anger. If you fear someone, then that person cannot excite you. The reason is that you have no control over him or her. But if you learn ways of attaining control, then you can get excited. When you are in control, then your fears become dormant.

The fear of society turns the psychopath into the loner, whereas the sociopath may give the impression that he is friendly and charming. The sociopathic killer operates as an organised killer, whilst the psychopathic killer operates as a dis-organised killer.

Trauma and the Trigger Situation

When considering perpetrators of serious crimes of rape and/or murder, the most difficult situation to understand is the first instance of committing such a crime on a stranger. What were the circumstances that drove the person into committing his first crime?  Why did he pick on a complete stranger?  Why was his stress levels so high that his self-control broke down and the only outlet was some form of serious criminal activity?  I present some comments on the likely motivations that cause a person to commit serial killing. Here I focus on why a killer targets someone he does not know (though there have been a few serial killers who killed their mothers).

Stranger rape and stranger murder is always symbolic. This is because the person is usually unable to face the parent (or other significant adult such as an uncle, aunt, neighbour) who caused his problems. So his victims often symbolise in some way the person who first abused him, irrespective of whether the abuse was intentional or unintentional.

Serial killers face the issues of validation and authenticity the same as everyone else. Because they enact out their childhood distress by assaulting and killing people, we can assume that their childhood trauma was very intense. The actual intensity will vary, depending on the age of the child when it experienced the trauma. If the young child experiences trauma whilst it is still creating its ego (in the first two or three years of its life) then the effect on the child will be more devastating than if the trauma occurs later.

I separate my analysis into two parts. One part focuses on the occurrence of a trigger that spurs the person to finally become antisocial in deadly ways. The other part assumes that there is no trigger but just the gradual build-up of mental stresses. These two parts are derived from the two forms of infancy trauma, those of fast-onset and slow-onset forms [5].

• Slow-onset Trauma

Slow-onset trauma means that the trauma happens over a period of time, by a process of cumulative addition of negative experiences of denigration by a significant adult. The parent may regularly criticise and find-fault with the child. What is at issue is the tone and intensity of the parent’s disapproval. Jealousy (self-pity mode) is induced in the child and it learns to hate the parent, though usually it has to deny the hatred in order to avoid further punishment.

When the child has become an adult, the final push that propels him into rape or murder of a stranger is a particular situation that he feels is a very humiliating one. This situation I call the trigger situation, by which I mean that a trigger is needed to push the person beyond his self-control. The loss of self-control is not necessarily obvious, since the potential perpetrator will not usually target the actual person who humiliated him, but some other person who is similar to that person. What seems to be common to many perpetrators is that the person (the humiliator) responsible for triggering his latest humiliation sets up the profile of the future victims of the perpetrator. If the humiliator is a young woman, the perpetrator will target young women. 

In this situation, the perpetrator feels that the threat level towards him is specific to some profile of a woman – perhaps her appearance, perhaps her character. So he will target women who symbolise the humiliator. Here the symbolism is specific. The primary emotional factor driving the perpetrator is hate. The precipitating cause of his decision to carry out rape or murder is the intensification of his fragility by the humiliator.

• Fast-onset Trauma

When the child’s distress is instantaneous and serious enough to create trauma, then I call it fast-onset trauma. This is always the result of an intense feeling of fear erupting like a volcano in the child. The child is overwhelmed by fear. The experience generates guilt in the child. The cause of fast-onset trauma can be either the experience of rejection or abandonment by a parent or the induction of terror by the excessive use of physical punishment. In the first case the child may be accurate in its belief that the parent has rejected it, or it may be mistaken by interpreting a parent’s mood of hostility (from any number of causes) as being one of rejection towards it. Either way, if the child’s state of mind is at that moment receptive to negative suggestion, then trauma will be induced in it.

When the child has become an adult, he may be propelled into rape or murder of a stranger. In this case I believe that no trigger situation is necessary. What happens is that the continuing accumulation of feelings of denigration effectively erodes his level of resiliency. He reaches the point when he has had enough; he is at the end of his tether. Because there is no specific trigger situation, then his potential targets are not specific either. He feels that the threat level towards him is general and can occur from anyone. He may target anyone, of any age, who gets in his way. 

Because the threat level is general, his targets are general symbols of society. If his father was authoritarian, he may target symbols of authority. If he is subjected to deep fear during his academic career, he may target academics. Any confrontation with authority figures raises his fear level very quickly. In this situation he may have only two choices: either to accept defeat, thereby becoming conformist (and even servile), or to walk out of his job or relationship as his only means of keeping his integrity. No other choice is likely because he will usually lack the social skills necessary to negotiate his way out of the difficulty.

The primary emotional factor driving the perpetrator is resentment. The precipitating cause of his decision to carry out rape or murder is the loss of his resiliency, the feeling that he has had enough. [ There is the possibility that if he doesn’t want to kill a stranger, then he may kill himself in an act of suicide, or more accurately, an act of martyrdom against an uncaring world.]

Bonding  Issues

Slow-onset trauma has the long-term effect that jealousy and hatred prevent the child from attaining a sense of validation. And fast-onset trauma has the long-term effect that fear of the parent prevents it from attaining a sense of stability and authenticity.

In general, when a child experiences trauma due to fear, then this will hinder, even prevent, any bonding with that parent. Whereas, the regular reception of criticism from the parent will make the child hate the parent. However, since it also loves the parent, the child will develop an intense love-hate relationship to that parent [6]. The child may experience fast-onset trauma from one parent and slow-onset trauma from the other. A likely scenario is that a boy fears his father and has a love-hate relationship to his mother (which was the scenario of my childhood).

Trauma in childhood damages the child’s emerging ego or personality. The damage relates only to situations that mirror the original abusive experience. Say, for example, the mother is the cause of abuse. Once the child has become an adult it can act in mature ways to all forms of experience, with one exception. That exception is in its relationships to adult women. The child’s fear of its mother will carry over into adulthood, so that as an adult there will always be an undercurrent of fear in its relationships with adult women.

[As an aside, this is why paedophilia is so widespread, both in the West and in the East. The man who had an abusive mother fears only adult women. Therefore he can sexually relate to young girls because he has no fear of them.]

The child, when it becomes an adult, may generalise the effects of trauma. If fast-onset trauma was caused by a man, then the child may fear and hate all forms of male authority and perhaps grow up to be rebellious or even a revolutionary. This kind of trauma may happen perhaps only a handful of times in the child’s life; if it happened more regularly then the child, once it is an adult, will be too submissive and terrorised to become a killer. Whereas slow-onset trauma produces ambiguous responses, depending on how the child adapted to the trauma. The child now both loves and hates the parent or the significant adult. This kind of trauma builds up gradually, due to many occurrences of the disturbing situation in the person’s childhood. If we assume that the mother caused the trauma, then this gives rise to the situation where the child, when it becomes an adult, may marry and have a family and yet will still turn into a serial killer, killing women.

Now the experience of trauma in childhood is not enough to turn a person into a serial killer. However, the trauma is a pre-condition that is necessary for anti-social thoughts to have any intensity in the subconscious mind. The trauma creates a condition of fragility in the child.

Another condition is the trigger situation, which often occurs in the child’s teenage years or early 20s, and is an experience of deep humiliation. This is the time when the child is most socially awkward, a time when sexual diffidence is most acute. The humiliation triggers the desire for revenge and retaliation. For example, the teenage boy attempts to date a girl and is repudiated; or perhaps he is working and his manager is a woman who ridicules him. Whatever the situation, the effect is that he feels humiliated, and he experiences it as being sexual in tone. He is too scared of his mother (as the cause of his childhood trauma) to think of having any revenge against her, so he channels all his repressed anger at her towards the person who has now humiliated him. Sooner or later he will begin attacking women, either as a rapist or as a killer.

[¹]. I have an article on Childhood Trauma. [1]

[²]. I have three articles on Emotion on the Home page. [2]

[³]. Becoming an impersonal slave is a feature of depersonalisation. See my article Six Variations and Seven Roots of Trauma - 4. [3]

[4]. See my article Philosophy of Nihilism. [4]

[5]. The speed of onset of trauma is described in the article Childhood Trauma. [5]

[6]. Love-hate relations are described in the article Parents and the Role of Death. [6]

Copyright © 2026 Ian Heath
All Rights Reserved

The copyright is mine, and the articles are free to use. They can be reproduced
anywhere, so long as the source is acknowledged.