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Possible Treatment For A Nine- Year Old Boy Mike

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In this paper, I would like to discuss a possible treatment for a nine- year-old boy Mike approaching it from two different psychoanalytical theoretical perspectives, Freudian and Winicottian. According to the case history, Mike’s parents were second generation Hispanic Americans. As a nine-year-old, Mike’s development is still ongoing and his parents or any adult significant people in his life are still the primary coauthors of his maturation, and eventually, his treatment.
The cultural transition and possibly the change in socioeconomic status had been ongoing for the parents. These transitions could have been factors in the degradation of their relationship as husband and wife. The parents’ marital circumstances that were on the verge …show more content…

Winnicott’s, on the other hand, will approach Mike’s problems in relation to the individual’s experience and response to society or its environment, as well as his characteristics in the light of the primary and secondary processes as complementary, rather than as being in opposition. Winnicott 's theoretical elusiveness has been linked to his efforts to modify Freudian and Kleinian views on the instincts and the harsh realities they had found in infant life. Instead, Winnicott studies the progress of the development of relationships themselves, observing how the individual becomes an individual, and assessing how infants’ environment affects the authentic self. Mike’s mother probably did not notice how much he was struggling because of the distraction of her own problems presented. It appears that Mike had developed a “false-self”, a self Winnicott describes as a defense that a child develops to protect the “true-self”. It revealed itself through compliance and rigidity as a way of coping with the world but prevented his emotional growth (Winnicott, 1963).
Although other psychoanalysts may have a different view of Winnicott’s theory of the true and false self, it may criticize that the theory may have been over-influenced by his own childhood experience of caring for a depressed mother, and himself developing a prematurely mature self which he was only

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