A Case study on Daren - psychoanalytic theory
In Darren’s case, the psychoanalytical theory is used. This is because Freud’s (1901) psychoanalytical theory seems to allow the explanation of usual behaviour of Darren’s criminal behaviour. This theory also allows the dealing with personality, developmental stages of Darren and his ego defence mechanism, which lead to his perception of his criminal activity as ‘not that bad of a crime’. In this report, we will look at a few theories explaining Darren’s behaviour and actions.
Freud's (1923) notion that the child's relationship to the parent is responsible for everything from psychiatric diseases to criminal behavior speaks right through Darren’s life. Darren, a child ignored and isolated by siblings, consistently neglected by his parents, ignoring his needs and concerns, lost trust in her maternal mother, received no appropriate levels of supervision nor discipline from a parent, found no figure to model his life. All these devastating effects on him resulting in injury emotionally and psychologically, permanently alter the psychological well-being of Daren and contribute to the nowadays rebellious, low self-esteem, problem youth.
In Freud’s (1923) theory, personal growth attributes many of our human problems, from depression to drug abuse, sexual disorders, eating disorders, to early childhood experience. Darren’s problems arise from dysfunctional parenting, a form of abuse leading to adult co-dependency, and an inability to lead a full and meaningful life. Added to that Darren is the youngest of the sibling but due to the large age gap he become the only child as in terms in Adler’s’ (1964) birth order: a spoilt child. The only child is more likely than others to be pampered; after all the parents have put all effort into the child so to speak. They are more likely to take special care of their pride and joy. However, if the parents were abusive the only child would have to put up with the abuse alone. The youngest child syndrome like Darren’s is almost like the only child and is more likely to be pampered by the parents and family members since they would never have to be dethrone from that position. Because of that, they are more prone to be the source of problem. They may also feel incredible inferiority with everyone older and more superior. In Darren’s case, it is not only the factor of birth order; his early childhood memory plays a very important part. He was also neglected by his parents who caused him to be emotionally unbalanced. He is only able to relate with materialism not emotional ability and physical abilities due to his parents traveling and constantly leaving him home alone and showering him with extravagant gifts to compensate for the time alone.
Freud (1915) believed that every child normally progressed from the oral to the anal and to the phallic phase, unless some negative influence interfered with this development. However, if the particular needs of any one of these phases were either unfulfilled or gratified to excess, the child could become "fixated" and thus hampered in its psychosexual growth. In Darren’s, case the resentment, the harsh rejection and the neglect from the parents, especially the extended overseas trips left young Darren in the care of a nanny. Darren suffered Oral fixation and phallic personality for lacking in sucking the mother’s breast and the needs of phallic phases were unfulfilled. This results in Darren to have multiple sex partners to satisfy his unconscious ID pleasure.
Darren has unresolved anal fixation at the age of five. He constantly looks for approval or attention from his family. Darren missed the important stage of building trust with his family as an accidental birth. This proceeded to self-doubting as he grew with a nanny at home alone and felt a sense of being disowned. He is forced to the locomotor stage where he becomes more forceful and assertive to achieve anything he desired. This is seen when Daren started showing signs of behavioural disorder where he threw tantrums, engaged in petty theft and lied effortlessly and persistently. His obsessiveness in turning to mischievous and criminal acts caused his relationship with his siblings to fall apart making him unable to gain approval and attention from those he looked up to as he grew up. Nobody actually helped him with his development at this stage which caused him to be stunted in this area.
In the phallic stage of his childhood, the Oedipus complex is clearly seen in Darren’s case. Darren at the third stage experiences when Freud (1915) term as phallic fixation which involves unconscious wishes to have sexual intercourse with one parent and replace the other parent. If this stage is not resolved, the child suffers Oedipus complex. This is caused by the absence of a father figure at home and the failures to gain closeness with his mother. According to Freud (1915), failure to pass through these earlier stages successfully leads to unresolved conflicts throughout adulthood. Thus, Darren looks to other females to satisfy his unconscious desire for pleasure. During his Genital, stage the onset of puberty where the main concentration of feeling is focus on the genital. Darren, a child without proper parental care and guidance, began exploring his primary school classmates by sexually touching girls in the class, which might mean nothing to him, if whatever he does was out of his unconscious mind.
Darren’s role confusion was demonstrated when he was in secondary school. He starts to connect to local gangsters and truanted frequently. Without parental love and support, Darren was confused over his status, role at home, and in society. In the eight stages of development of Erikson’s (1980) social theory, during the fifth psychosocial crisis 13 or 14 years old to about 20 years, the child, now an adolescent, learns to answer satisfactorily and happily the question of "Who am I?" Nevertheless, even the best - adjusted of adolescents experiences some role identity diffusion: most boys experiment with minor delinquency; rebellion flourishes; self-doubts flood the youngster, and so on. Darren with no exception connects himself with the local gangs, as there is no modeling figure for him at home. Erikson believes that during successful early adolescence, mature time perspective is developed; the young person acquires self-certainty as opposed to self-consciousness and self-doubt. However, Darren could not understand and doubted his own abilities. Truancy is the clear sign of him not being accepted and acknowledged in his school which leads to his thinking of why he is ostracized by his schoolmate and being constantly ridiculed by the teachers.
Erikson (1980) believed a psychologically healthy adolescence normally anticipates achievement, and achieves, rather than being "paralysed" by feelings of inferiority or by an inadequate time perspective. The adolescent seeks leadership (someone to inspire him), and gradually develops a set of ideals (socially congruent and desirable, in the case of the successful adolescent). Darren is no exception, he too want to be an achiever but rejected by parents and the academic world left him no choice but to turn to the local gang and to being identified with them. This proving Maslow’s (1998 Maslow & Lowery) Hierarchy of Needs where human beings must fulfill the more basic needs, such as physical, security, and belonging needs before being able to fulfill the higher need of self actualization. Subtlety, Darren has the desire to be like his father, to be successful, to be a Mr. Nice in everybody’s eye, but he needed to belong, needs to find security which his family and friends can not provide. Unfortunately, he ended up with the wrong company, wrong belonging, wrong security and wrong motivator.
Other complications resulting from these three stages also cause Darren to have difficulty in maintaining friendship due to his basic selfishness and dishonesty. With his rich family background and his intelligent mind, he seemed to be a self-sufficient child who did not seek or need close relationships but his inability to concentrate and lack of commitment resulting from the anal stage causes his academic performance to slip downhill.
According to Skinner’s (?) operant conditioning theory; a behavior no longer followed by the reinforcing stimulus results in a decreased probability of that behavior occurring in the future. However, a behavior followed by a reinforcing stimulus results in an increased probability of that behavior occurring in the future.
In Darren case, the first reconditioning comes along when he was in primary school. His parent knowing his naughty acts did not punish the boy but protected him by making a donation to the school. This recondition fits Skinner’s (?) operant conditioning a behavior (stealing) followed by a reinforcing stimulus (donation) results in an increased probability of that behavior (stealing) again occurring in the future. At the young age, Darren felt that stealing is right because there is no punishment and perhaps he believes this is the only way to catch his father’s attention and have more naughty acts for the father to attend to. In other words, he found pleasure (thanatos) in what he is doing.
According to Bandura (1965), one of the major sources of self efficacy is through mastery experiences. In Darren’s case, whenever he does something mischievous or bad, he gets away with it when his father donates a large sum to the school. The action of Darren’s father put a positive reinforcement to giving him the attention he desires thus he keeps repeating his mischief and bad behaviour at school. According to Bandura (1965), a person’s behaviour is affected by 3 factors. These 3 factors are cognitive learning, behavioural learning and environmental influences. Darren feels good for doing bad. This cognitive learning causes him to have the perception that he gets attention from playing truant, using drugs recreationally, underage drinking and shoplifting. This was reinforced since he was little as he finds that that is the only way to get his father’s attention.
Darren has a high intelligence and through the external influences from peer pressure and observational learning from other the prison inmates he mingled with, he figures out methods to make better plans such as fraud of a bigger scale. To Darren, he sees the plan as an opportunity for an improved way of living. Through Badura’s (1965) theory of self efficacy, Darren unconsciously always falls back to bad or criminal activities from enactive learning since childhood as he was rewarded by his parent’s attention when he was naughty at school.
In his teenage years, Darren wants same pleasures of richness but refuses to rely on his parent’s provision as he gets older. This is explained through Erikson’s (1980) theory of the adolescence stage where the conflict between identity versus role confusion where like every teenager and young adult, he is tempted by his ego to be independent. Through this, he finds ways and means for earning an income including impersonating a registered charity collector or stealing an expensive suit from an exclusive menswear shop; and because his enactive learning causes him to always fall back on criminal activities. He finds himself returning to his family home when he gets desperate but not staying for long as he still tries to establish his independent status in the society. Darren is searching for his identity but is confused between the right and the wrong. He turns to drugs and alcoholism for temporary relief as he finds it as a way to liberate him from decision making.
Through his adolescent stage, being ignored by his parents where he developed no bond with any family members in his upbringing forces him to grow strong in his ego where his self defence mechanism is developed to protect himself from being ignored.
The Freudian belief that we are governed in our actions by powerful unconscious forces has shifted modern perspectives away from personal responsibility. In Darren unconscious self-argued: I am who I am and I do what I do not because of me but because of early experiences over which I had no control. I am not responsible for my actions, my father or my mother is. This is a defence mechanism of ‘projection’ which Darren developed throughout his stages of development when neglected by his family. He unconsciously denied responsibility for his actions because he believes that he has to be the way he is to survive.This belief too has done damage in Darren’s attitude towards women. Women, his mothers and as the primary caregiver, have had enormous anger directed towards him as architects and perpetrators of misdirected early childhood experience. Darren’s relationships with other women seem to reflect his parent’s relationship with him. His inability to long term commitment and care for other people is lacking as his parents were not always there or caring about him constantly as other parents do for their child. Adding to that, his mother only showered him with gifts but never developed a close relationship with him. His abnormal childhood rendered him unable to sustain any long term relationship with the other sex.
For his current offence, Darren realised that he needed a status in society to be trusted and a solid plan to build a business. With that in mind he invested a substantial amount of time in planning and researches with shows his seriousness in attaining success. As he is intelligent, he manages to start up the whole scheme without much trouble and for status, he uses his family name for trading. He somehow believes that his parents would support his business activities by using the family name for his plans. This might be due to the fact that they were always there to assist him at all times even in criminal activities when caught. He seemed to be confident in success as he seemed to be at ease with his actions during the interview with the psychologist. Darren seems to have the idea in his head and thinks that his parents would have done the same thing to achieve the status and richness through fraudulent activities. Being brought up in a house where he couldn’t have seen how his parents achieved status in society developed his ego defence mechanism of rationalising. His father also reinforced this by ‘bribing’ the school with donations, so that they kept Darren in their education system and the police, even when he was involved in illegal activities. Through the action of his father, he rationalized that everybody who is in business or rich could have been involved in some illegal or fraudulent activities to achieve their accepted status in society. We can clearly see this in his seriousness in putting a lot of effort planning and organizing his fraudulent activity. He is doing it to gain acceptance to the society, fulfilling his ego needs.
In conclusion, according to Freud (1915), Darren has a personality complex, which causes him to fall back to his criminal activities. In the youngest child syndrome according to Adler’s (1954) theory, Darren is driven to exceed his siblings who are well established with families and society. To achieve that, he tries hard to gain wealth status and recognition from society. From another perspective, Erickson’s (1980) explanation on psychosocial theories explained Darren’s inability to communicate or establish his own identity, which causes him to feel isolated, and the need to prove he is able to survive in the society by clinging on to gangs. He is trying to survive the social and wealth status through criminal acts which he believes is not wrong according to his unconscious mind.
(require more percise intext references)
References
Adler, A (1954) Understanding Human Nature, New York; Greenburg Publisher
Adler, A (1964). The structure of neurosis. In H.L Ansbacher & R.R. Ansbacher (Eds), Superiority and social interest (pp. 83-95). New Yiork:Viking press. (Original work published 1932) (13)
Bandura, A (1965). Influence of the models' reinforcement contigencies on the acquisition of imitative responses. Jornal of Social Psychology. 1, 589-595
Role cofussion
Erikson, E. (1980). Elements of psychoanalytic theory of psychosocial development. In S. Greenspan, & G. Pollock, (Eds.), The Course of life, Vol 1 (pp. 11-61). Washington, DC: US Dept. of Health and Human Services.
Erikson, E.H (1950). Childhood and society. New York: Norton.
Erikson, E.H. (1959). Grow and Crisis of the healthy personality. Psychological Issues,1, 50-100
Freud, A. (1946). The ego and the mechanisms of defense. American Edition, New York, A: I.U.P.
Freud, S. (1901). The psychology of everyday life, S.E., 6, 1-290.
Freud, S. (1915). Repression, S.E., 14,146-158.
Freud, S. (1915). Repression, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 14. Edited by James Strachey. Lodon: The Hogart Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1974.
Freud, S. (1923). The ego and the id, S.E. 19, 12-66Freud, S. (1940). Spliting of the ego in the process of defence. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 22, 65 (1938), S.E., 23:275-278
Maslow, A & Lowery, R. (ED). (1998). Toward a psychology of being, 3rd edition , New York: Wiley & Sons.
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