Bases of Psychopathology



Bases of Psychopathology

Introduction

The case is based on a young girl known as Gina Strowalski, who was a 23 year-old part-time student at a local community college who also worked as a barista at a local coffee shop. She lived with her parents and two sisters. She experienced some mental problems at various occasions. Gina collapsed one day at her graduate school and was brought to emergency for medical checkup. The doctors made a diagnosis that Gina suffered from high level of fatigue and it was affecting her quite badly. All these factors have given a rise to the clinical diagnosis known as Psychopathology. The application of this diagnosis in such a situation is quite important. Therefore, all the issues related to bases of psychopathology will be discussed in detail.

Overview of psychoanalysis of Gina Psychoanalysis, in theory and in practice, has historically privileged the parent child relationship. There is a cultural sensibility to this tradition, as it is commonly understood that parents, both genetically and socially, are prominent players in determining who their children become as adults. This social and cultural emphasis has guided the development of psychoanalytic theory and its application from Freud's theory of the Oedipus complex to contemporary clinicians' work in the treatment room. When a patient enters analytic treatment, the basic concept of the importance of the parent, as an external figure and an internal object, can easily guide the analytic couple toward an emphasis on the patient's relationships with her parents. Clinicians are trained to think in complex ways about a patient's parents, the impact of the primary parental objects henceforth referred to as mother, the importance of the child's earliest experiences, and the ways that the child internalizes the parents, to name a few but there is minimal, if any, focus on the sibling relationship even though most children in America grow up with siblings, the average number of children per household is 1.88. There is limited psychoanalytic literature on siblings and, with the exception of a description of sibling identifications that was presented by the researchers in 1982; there is virtually no theoretical framework for conceptualizing and attending to the dynamics of siblings. Further overlooked are the nuances of sibling dyads and the interrelationship of the parent-child and child-sibling dyads. If people understand the parent-child relationship to be crucial to psychological development, then it must also be considered when examining the sibling relationship. This author argues that the two relationships (sibling-sibling and parent-child), when present, are dynamically interrelated and that one's psychological development may be meaningfully influenced by both mother and sibling.

The application of Object Relations theory in the case

The central axiom of Object Relations theory is that humans are object-seeking. From earliest infancy the human is engaged in a continuous process of searching for relationships to others, not solely for the gratification of drive needs, but for the opportunity to build, through capacity for identification, an integrated identity. In most cases, the infant's earliest relationship is to ...