Case Study of a Woman With a Strong Sense of Self

This paper is an analysis of the life of a woman whose experiences allowed her to form a strong sense of self with a well-integrated, positive self-concept and identity. It uses a variety of theories about the formation of personality and the concept of the self to look at the ways in which this individual was able to grow up, deal with a series of psychological crises, and construct a relatively healthy, positive perception of herself and her environment. Starting with Sigmund Freud's theories of identity formation and psychosexual stages of development, many theorists have speculated on the ways in which personality is constructed successfully. This paper looks at many of these different approaches through the detailed analysis of one particular case.

Maggie K. was born in Bismark, Illinois, a small town just north of Danville and about 90 miles south of Chicago. Her father, David, was a fairly successful salesman; her mother, Alina, was a full-time housewife, focused on raising Maggie and her two younger siblings, Denise and Charlie. The events of Maggie's life recounted in this study are based on Maggie's own memories and the stories the family has told about itself. Maggie is especially qualified to think about her personal psychological development because she became a counsellor and sociologist, a career that encouraged her to look at her own life for support of the theories she was studying and for increased self-understanding.

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ue memories are from the end of this period, when she was about 3. Before this time, she is uncertain that what she remembers is more than a constructed memory, built on old photographs and family stories. In the early stages of becoming aware of herself as a person, Maggie was experiencing what Seymour Epstein (1973, May) calls the development of the self-concept, an important step which "organizes the data of experience, particularly experience involving social interaction, into predictable sequences of action and reaction . . . [and] facilitates attempts to fulfill needs while avoiding disapproval and anxiety" (p. 407). Maggie was learning to think of herself as a separate individual, capable of making sense of the world around her and manipulating it to meet her own needs. The next three years were spent in the phallic stage, during which the superego begins to coalesce. Freud argues that this is the period in which the child begins to establish a sexual role identity, attaching to the same-sex parent and, usually unconsciously, battling the other parent for control in the relationship. Charlie was born during this time, and Maggie remembers her father's delight that he now had a son. She also recalls being secretly hap

Category: Psychology - C