Aileen wuornos : a psychobiographical study

A psychobiographical study is an exploration of a unique individual’s entire lived life through a psychological lens. The aim of the study was to explore and describe the personality development of Aileen Wuornos within her socio-historical context by applying Erikson’s Theory of Psychosocial Development. Aileen Carol Wuornos was an American serial killer who murdered seven men in Florida between 1989 and 1990 by shooting them at point blank range. Wuornos’s life was marked by a difficult formative environment, maternal abandonment, and adoption by her grandparents. Wuornos continued to experience physical, emotional and sexual abuse at the hands of family members, friends and the community. Wuornos lived her life focusing on survival, and started to engage with petty crime and prostitution to do so. Her patterns escalated to include more serious criminal behaviour, culminating in serial murder. Wuornos was selected for this study using nonpropability purposive sampling. She was selected based on the researcher’s curiosity of her life events and experiences that led her to commit serial murders. Data was collected through a variety of primary and secondary sources on Wuornos and it was analysed using Miles and Huberman’s three steps process of data analysis, which includes data reduction, data display, and conclusion drawing and verification. The findings of this study indicate that Wuornos experiences severe difficulties in renegotiating the seven stages proposed by Erikson’s Theory of Psychosocial Development, and all the ego strengths that she developed were seriously delayed