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A CASE OF KLEPTOMANIA

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CASE STUDY- A CASE OF KLEPTOMANIA
BARTON A. SINGER, Ph. D
This patient is a 35 years old mother who has married over fifteen years. She has two kids and lives with upper-middle class life (which means they do not have financial problem). One of interesting thing is the patient was referred by her lawyer for the second offense punishable by imprisonment because of stealing act.
The patient has undergone psychological and psychiatric evaluation to determine whether she can control her stealing habit by her maximum effort of rationally thought. Fortunately, her psychopathological behavior has occurred for 1-2 times per month for many years. This means that she can control her pathological behavior in most of the time under certain condition.
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She has struggle for many years for the decision to seek treatment because the psychic pain was not intense enough to motivate her for seeking treatment. Luckily in this case, this patient knows well how to discharge all the negative emotion and tension in order to avoid the reflection of pathological behavior.
For treatment consideration, the patient has undergone the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS), Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) and Rorschach Inkblot Technique. By doing all these tests, we can found that the patient has excessive needs for care, approval and attention from the people who are important to her. As a result, it is clear that the patient is seriously need psychotherapy to deal with her passive-dependent striving and conflicted sexual identity.
Abrahamsen (1960) sounds that kleptomania is more related to obsessive-compulsive affliction. This is because the patients usually know recognize that their act is wrong but they just can’t resist doing it repeatedly. In this case, the patient was clearly aware that her stealing action was illegal and unhealthy, but she usually suppressed and repressed the issue and was motivated by intense unconscious dependency needs to continue this pathological behavior in spite of the

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