Case Study

I chose to pick a fictional character that played in a couple of films and now has a TV series. This particular boy suffered severe emotional abuse as a child at the hands of his mother who preached to him that sexual intercourse is sinful and that all women except her are whores. The boy’s father died which left the boy and his mother living alone together until adolescence, when his mother took on a boyfriend. This boy became incredibly jealous and murdered both him and his mother with strychnine.

After committing these murders this boy forged a suicide note to make it look as though his mother had killed her lover and then herself. After he went through a brief hospitalization for shock, he developed dissociative identity disorder, assuming her personality to repress his awareness of her death and to escape the feelings of guilt for murdering her. He then inherited his mother’s house where he kept her corpse.

One of his personalities was a child that was dependent on his mother; another was a possessive mother who kills anyone who threatens the illusion of her existence and the one who was a functional adult who goes through the motions of day to day life as the manager of his motor court.

The first personalities is based on the boys mom and dominates much as she did when she was alive forbidding him to have any friends and flying into violent rages whenever he feels attracted to a woman. The two personalities carry on conversations through the boy talking to himself in his mother’s voice, and he dresses in his mother’s clothes whenever the first personality takes hold completely.

Biological theorists believe that the main trigger for dissociative identity disorder is trauma typically suffered in childhood. This boy suffe...

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... a normal life and struggled with the two.

The humanistic model focuses on distinctively human issues such as self-awareness, values, meaning, and choice. Humanists believe that people are driven to self-actualize and when that is interrupted abnormal behaviors may result. In this case the boy was driven to self-actualize however when his father passed away his mother didn’t let him out of her sight which stopped him from him making life decisions on his own.

According to the sociocultural model, abnormal behavior is best understood in light of the broad forces that influence an individual. This consists of the roles this person plays in the environment and what kind of family structure or cultural background they partake in. In fact, the sociocultural model is comprised of two major perspectives the family; social perspective and the multicultural perspective.