Mind over Matter: Developmental Psychology and Trauma
Life is a series of adventures - some good, and some bad. From birth, through childhood, and on to adulthood, each of us interacts with those around her or him. We think and feel. We dream and hope. We find our way, or get lost trying. Different individuals react to similar events in a variety of ways. There are perhaps as many responses to situations, as there are human beings on the Planet Earth. Yet we all share certain emotions. Some of these emotions are more powerful than others; the more powerful they are, the more they tend to shape an individual's life; to form his or her character. A person who has known great happiness will tend to have a different outlook from a person who has known terrible sadness. The good people, and the good things, that we encounter can help us to feel good about ourselves, and about our place in society. While the bad people, and the bad things, that cross our paths, can make us feel afraid, or out of place. Sometimes the awful and painful experiences loom so large in our memories that we can scarcely bear the pain. We try to block out these things, or to forget about them completely. We develop coping mechanisms to deal with these seemingly impossible and unbearable situations.
Ultimately, the woman's partial amnesia, and later total paralysis and complete loss of the ability to speak, are evidence of the way in which she deals with the problems with which she is faced. Every man and woman grows up faced with numerous difficult tasks. Certain events and individuals, the child will find displeasing, or even frightening. The child must learn either to deal with these people and situations, or must learn to avoid them. The subject's reaction to what appears to have been a more egregious repeat of a prior situation (more egregious in that she was now likely a mother herself) was conditioned by the coping skills she had evolved earlier in life. These coping skills themselves are based on a still deeper approach to problem solving. At an extremely early age, a child already begins to develop her or his cognitive skills. These skills, whether they be for counting or arranging objects, or for dealing with people, will eventually form themselves into a system. Once created, an individual's cognitive system will tend to stay fairly similar. Minor techniques may be added or left off, but the general approach adopted by an individual will remain substantially similar because it works - or at least it appears to work. Lev Vigotsky developed a test of cognitive ability that involved sorting a variety of colored blocks. While it sounds simple, the Vigotsky Test does reveal certain very basic facts about an individual's cognitive make-up. Furthermore, variants of what Vigotsky described can be applied in a wide range of situations, including those in which a subject deals with other people. For example, there is the Rep Test: Methodologically the Rep Test is an application of the familiar concept-formation test procedure. It uses as 'objects' those persons with whom the subject has had to deal in his daily living. Instead of sorting Vigotsky blocks or BRL objects the subject sorts people. (Kelly, 1991, p. 152) The client, in this case, is sorting the attacker, and the incident according to means that she developed early in life. Concealing the memories of the event and the attacker - cutting off all communication with the attacker - appeared to work. It preserved the subject from pain, and unnecessary anguish and discomfort. And years later, when she had a child of her own, it seemed to offer the hope of protecting the child as well. Freud contended that observer memories--which we view as a detached observer--are necessarily altered versions of the original episode, because our initial perception of an event takes place from a field perspective. Noting the frequency of the observer perspective in his patients' childhood recollections, Freud believed that he had strong evidence for the reconstructive nature of early memories. Whereas Freud would see these reactions as an almost subconscious response by an individual who has not managed yet to create a fully distinct identity for herself - the withdrawal representing that attempt at differentiation - Piaget would note that, more than likely, the woman comprehends the wrongness of that acts that she witnesses. According to Jean Piaget's Theory of Moral Development, * Feeling that your life has consistency and is headed in a meaningful direction; that there is a connection between who you were in the past and who you will be in the future. Many different developmental theories can be used to explain the conditions experienced by the subject. Though they differ in their emphases, each theory offers a way of looking into the human mind. Freud and Piaget focused on the underlying causes of such a disorder, for both it was an "abnormal" development during some standard developmental stage. For Freud, the woman's experience was no doubt a failure to separate out her sexual self from some adult to whom she was close as a child. For Piaget, it was more a matter of the actual events. Meanwhile, the theories of Maslow, Bandura, Erikson,
Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 3237
Approximate Pages = 13 (250 words per page double spaced)
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