Psychodynamic Case Study On Eleanor Longden

Schizophrenia is something that I find very fascinating. Even though we just covered this very subject in our textbook this past week, this is a topic that has always fascinated me. My dad is in the medical field and some of my favorite stories that he has told us are of cases that he studied in psychology class during medical school. Many of his stories are very sad because of the horrible devastation that this disease has caused them, but yet despite the many horrible stories, he has also shared stories of those who had received much healing (very similarly to the TEDTalk of Eleanor Longden that we could react to). It is a very complex disorder that can completely change a person’s entire life. My case study will be on a woman that I know

For a few years, she practiced nursing in a hospital and seemed to be thriving. However, eventually her family noticed a change in her. She became very paranoid and distant from those around her. Eventually she lost her job and was basically unable to be a functioning member of society. Now almost 25 years later, she is almost completely alienated from her family, friends, and the majority of society. She has almost no contact with the outside world and only leaves her house to walk around her neighborhood and to attend church. The psychodynamic theoretical model is a model that explains schizophrenia through deficits in Freud’s theory of the ego and the id. The id is the primitive aspect of our mind that regulates what is happening between the ego, the realistic aspect of our mind, and the superego, the moral aspect of our mind (Sergrist, 2009). This theoretical model explains this woman’s affliction by saying that this disease comes from the aggressive or sexual desires of the id, completely overtaking the ego and thus not allowing it to mediate between the id and the superego in our live decisions (Nevid, Rathus, and Green, 2018). This then means

There are many different biological speculations as to what causes schizophrenia, but one of the main reasons is that it “involves overactivity if dopamine transmission in the brain (Nevid et al., 431). This hyper-activity can then result in the hallucinations and the other symptoms associated with schizophrenia. Studies have shown though, that it is not necessarily an overage of dopamine in the brain, but rather the brain not being able to properly receive and respond to the dopamine that it receives (Nevid et al., 2018). Strictly, behavioral theorists would claim that people develop schizophrenia from defective learning of what is correct behavior and what is not correct behavior (Nevid et al., 2018). When I was researching and thinking about how behavioral theorists would explain schizophrenia, I was able to grasp how this perspective would explain schizophrenia by realizing that the voices and hallucinations in side the ill person’s head would be the encouraging aspect of the problem. When the person with schizophrenia is having a schizophrenic episode, those voices and situations that are not in line with reality, would be the factors that conditioned the person to believe the voices and hallucinations, thus leading them to consider these episodes to be reality. According to Beck and Rector (2005), the cognitive approach to schizophrenia holds