John Wayne Gacy Psychology of Personality Development on a Famous Person

His father Gacy Sr subjected him to mental and physical abuse. His father, a drunkard chastised him for supposedly being deficient of masculine qualities owing to his preference of cooking and garden work which was associated with girls (John Wayne Gacy Biography, 2018). He also struggled with sexual identity opting to marry as a means of concealing his sexuality as a homosexual. At one point, he was convicted of sodomizing a young boy and got incarcerated. When Wayne Gacy’s father’s died during the incarceration period, he became a disturbed person, even becoming violent, understandably associating the death with the shame he believed he had caused his father due to the conviction for sodomy. Evaluation of the theory against Gacy’s case presents a plausible explanation to his criminal tendencies based on everyday observable behavior hence providing a conceptual framework to understanding human behavior.

It is, however, a relatively weak theory because its scientific validity is deficient and instead relies on the interpretation of the therapist. Psychosocial theories as proposed by the likes of Erik Erikson and Mary Ainsworth can also be applied to Gacy’s case. The psychosocial perspectives allude to a person’s early development interactions as having a bearing on such murderous outcomes as serial killing. Particularly, psychosocial theories deal with the aspects of attachment, moral development, and identity formation, processes that characterize the period from birth till adolescence (Harmening, 2014). The models, however, present a scientific way of understanding an individual’s personality and deviant behavior as opposed to the generalized view of the phenomenon. John Gacy’s personality as a consequence of cognitive, behavioral and learning theories can also be evaluated.

The cognitive theories relate to learning as a consequence of socialization whereby cognitive schemata, or rather structures, for example, gender schemata, are progressively modified to accommodate knowledge gained from new experiences thereby delineating appropriate responses to situations (Friedman and Schustack, 2013). The behaviorist approach postulates that personality, like other behaviors, is gained through reinforcement, scaffolding, and conditioning. Consistently with the theories, John Gacy’s personality and criminal tendencies were internalized following childhood exposure to molestation. The test requires some 567 responses and is carried out on a 10 scale range obtained from scores (Friedman and Schustack, 2013). It can be applied in understanding the clients’ psychological status ranging from physical symptoms, depression to hysteria, paranoia, and hypomania (Friedman and Schustack, 2013). The test is only given and interpreted by persons who are trained for the purpose.