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A psychobiographical study of Temple Grandin

- Wannenburg, Nicola

  • Authors: Wannenburg, Nicola
  • Date: 2018
  • Subjects: Grandin, Temple , Psychology Biographical methods , Psychoanalysis , Autistic women United States Biography , Women animal specialists United States Biography , Developmental psychology , Erikson, Erik H (Erik Homburger), 1902-1994
  • Language: English
  • Type: text , Thesis , Doctoral , PhD
  • Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/57358 , vital:26877
  • Description: Psychobiographical researchers methodically formulate life histories and interpret them by means of psychological theories. The research typically focuses on exemplary and completed lives. The cases that are studied are usually of individuals who are of particular interest to society as a result of excelling in their particular fields, be they to benefit or detriment of society. Temple Grandin was chosen for this study using purposive sampling as she meets the psychobiographical requirement of being an extraordinary individual. As an individual with autism Grandin faced many challenges growing up. Despite a difficult and absent beginning, Grandin developed into a stable and scientifically creative adult who contributes to society. She excels as an animal scientist and designer of humane livestock handling facilities and has an international reputation for her contribution to the livestock industry and animal welfare. The primary aim of this study is to describe and interpret the life of Temple Grandin through Erikson’s (1950/1973) theory of psychosocial development. A mixed method approach (Yin, 2006) was employed for the conduction of this study. The overarching data processing and analysis guidelines for this study were provided by Miles and Huberman (1994, 2002a, 2002b). The conduction of the processing and analysis of data was aided by Alexander’s (1988, 1990) method of asking the data questions as well as an integration of Yin’s (2014) time series analysis with Erikson’s (1950/1973) triple bookkeeping approach. This study contributes to the development of psychobiographical research in South Africa as well as to personality and developmental theory.
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  • Date Issued: 2018

A psychobiographical study of Antwone Fisher

- Wannenburg, Nicola

  • Authors: Wannenburg, Nicola
  • Date: 2014
  • Subjects: Fisher, Antwone Quenton , Psychology -- Biographical methods , Psychoanalysis , Abused children -- Biography
  • Language: English
  • Type: Thesis , Masters , MSc
  • Identifier: vital:3219 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1012939
  • Description: Psychobiographical researchers methodically formulate life histories and interpret them by means of psychological theories. The research typically focuses on exemplary and completed lives. The cases that are studied are usually of individuals who are of particular interest to society as a result of excelling in their particular fields, be they to society’s benefit or detriment. Antwone Fisher was chosen for this study using purposive sampling as he meets the psychobiographical requirement of being an extraordinary individual. Fisher grew up in the Foster Care System and faced many abusive experiences as child. Despite difficult beginnings, Fisher developed into a stable and creative adult who excels as a poet, screenwriter and film director. The primary aim of this study is to describe and interpret the life of Antwone Fisher through Erikson’s theory of psychosocial development. The data was processed and analysed using Miles and Hubermans’ general view of qualitative analyses as well as Alexander’s method of asking the data questions. This study contributes to the development of psychobiographical research in South Africa as well as to personality and developmental theory.
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  • Date Issued: 2014

Michael Jackson : a psychobiography

- Ruiters, Jeremy John

  • Authors: Ruiters, Jeremy John
  • Date: 2014
  • Subjects: Jackson, Michael, 1958-2009 , Psychology -- Biographical methods , Psychoanalysis , African American singers -- Biography
  • Language: English
  • Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
  • Identifier: vital:3228 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1013061
  • Description: In a psychobiography a psychological theory is used as a framework to uncover the story of an individual. The psychobiographical approach to research tends to be underutilised. The result of this is that an important area for the application of psychobiographical theory and the study of completed lives is neglected. The value of psychobiographical studies has been advocated by many scholars in the field of psychobiographical research for the development and testing of theories relating to human development. The subject under investigation in this psychobiography is Michael Jackson. Although much has been written about Jackson, not much of the existing literature adopts a psychological focus. The sampling procedure was purposive, as the subject was deliberately selected. The aim of this research was to explore and describe the life of Jackson through the use of the psychobiographical case method. Life history material in the form of biographies, newspaper articles, documentaries and interviews aided in creating a biographical sketch of Jackson's life. The progression of Jackson's personality development was analysed using Erikson’s psychosocial development theory. The data collection and analysis were conducted according to Yin's analytical generalisation which consists of two main strategies: (1) using a theoretical framework as a guide to determine what data are relevant, and (2) developing a matrix as a descriptive framework for organising and integrating the data. Furthermore, the process of data analysis was aided by the use of guidelines prepared by Alexander with Erikson’s psychosocial development as the theoretical framework. This research undertaking can be recognised as a positive demonstration of the value of Erikson’s psychosocial developmental theory in understanding the process of Michael Jackson's personality development. Recommendations regarding future research that utilises the psychobiographical research design and methodology have been made.
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  • Date Issued: 2014

A psycho-educational programme to facilitate the mental health of adolescent girls who are victims of verbal bullying

- Jacobs, Ruwayda

  • Authors: Jacobs, Ruwayda
  • Date: 2012
  • Subjects: Teenage girls -- Mental health -- South Africa , Psychoanalysis , Bullying
  • Language: English
  • Type: Thesis , Doctoral , PhD
  • Identifier: vital:9946 , http://hdl.handle.net/10948/d1014579
  • Description: Bullying appears to be a worldwide phenomenon. It occurs within schools, homes, and in the community too. Bullying is a form of aggressive behaviour. Female bullying is not so easily noticed, as girls hardly ever use physical forms of aggression. Bullying can have a detrimental effect on the mental health of the victim. The victims of bullying experience symptoms of mental discomfort, which include low self esteem, feelings of helplessness, feelings of worthlessness and inferiority, lack of confidence, isolation, self-conscientiousness; and lastly, this can lead to suicide. Some form of intervention is necessary to provide adolescents with skills to combat bullying and help them to become mentally healthy again. The overall goal of the study was to develop, implement and evaluate a psycho-educational programme for female adolescents in a secondary school setting, in order to assist them in coping with bullying. The objectives of the research study were to: Conduct asituational analysis to identify the mental health needs of adolescent girls, as victimsof bullying. Develop a psycho-educational programme to facilitate the promotion of mental health of those adolescent girls who are victims of bullying. Implement the psycho-educational programme to facilitate coping by adolescent girls who are victims of bullying.  Assess whether the adolescent girls have benefitted from attending the psycho-educational programme. The researcher used a qualitative, explorative, descriptive and contextual design. The research methodology consisted of four phases. In phase one of the research, a situational analysis was done; and the characteristics of mental discomfort exhibited by the victim were identified. The needs of the adolescent girl who has been bullied have already been described. Phase two involved the development of a psycho-educational programme. The information from the situational analysis was used to develop the conceptual framework. The six concepts in the survey list of Dickoff et al. (1968:422) were described as follows: the recipient is the adolescent girl who has been bullied, the agent is an advanced psychiatric nurse, the context is the community and the secondary school where bullying takes place, the dynamics of the intervention constitute the mental discomfort experienced by the adolescent girl. This is what motivates her to participate in the programme. The procedure was identified as the psycho-educational programme, while the terminus or outcome of the intervention for the adolescent girl would be for her to experience mental health after being exposed to the psycho-educational programme. The relationship between the concepts was used to form the mind map of the conceptual framework. This guided the development of the psycho-educational programme. The content of the programme has already been described. In phase three the psycho-educational programme is implemented and in phase four the programme is evaluated. The psycho-educational programme taught the teenage girls skills and it provided them with knowledge to cope better with the bullying. Attending the programme made the teenagers aware that they needed to change to experience mental health and happiness. The empirical study took place in phase four. The data-gathering method in phase four included the conducting of semi-structured interviews with the adolescent girls who participated in the programme, as well as the teachers of these adolescent girls and their parents. Naïve sketches, reflective journals, observations made and field notes formed part of this database. The data was analyzed by means of Tesch‟s descriptive analysis (in Creswell, 2003:192). The participants had to comment on how they were coping after the implementation of the psycho-educational programme. In conclusion, an intervention in the form of the psycho-educational programme was shown to be beneficial to adolescent girls who were victims of bullying, to assist them in coping with the aftermath of being bullied. Recommendations were made to enhance nursing practice, as well as nursing education and nursing research. Keywords: Adolescent girls, bullying, secondary schools, advanced psychiatric nurse, psycho-educational programme, mental health.
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  • Date Issued: 2012

An archaelogy of South Africanness: the conditions and fantasies of a post-apartheid festival

- Truscott, Ross

  • Authors: Truscott, Ross
  • Date: 2012
  • Subjects: Nationalism -- South Africa -- History -- 20th century , Whites -- Race identity -- South Africa , Afrikaner loyalists , Psychoanalysis , Discourse analysis , Multiculturalism -- South Africa
  • Language: English
  • Type: Thesis , Doctoral , D Soc Sc (Psych)
  • Identifier: vital:11610 , http://hdl.handle.net/10353/539 , Nationalism -- South Africa -- History -- 20th century , Whites -- Race identity -- South Africa , Afrikaner loyalists , Psychoanalysis , Discourse analysis , Multiculturalism -- South Africa
  • Description: It has become commonplace in academic studies, particularly those with a critical bent, to view nations as being historical constructs, as being without essence, though not without effects of exclusion and inclusion, of the constitution of the „authentic‟ national subject and the „other of the nation.‟ The critical impetus at work here is to show how a nation is constructed in order to bring into view the knowledge and power relations this construction entails, to show whose interests the construction serves, and whose it does not. This study examines the discursive production, the performative enactment and the spatial emplacement of post-apartheid „South Africanness‟ through a case study of Oppikoppi music festival. Oppikoppi is an annual event that emerged in 1994, on the threshold of the „new South Africa.‟ The festival is attended predominantly by young white Afrikaans-speaking South Africans and is held on a farm in the northernmost province of Limpopo, South Africa, an area notoriously conservative in its racial politics. Yet, curiously, Oppikoppi has been repeatedly referred to, and refers to itself with an almost obsessive regularity and repetitiveness, as a „truly South African‟ event. Indeed, the festival has been promoted, since 1998, as „The Home of South African Music,‟ and in 2009 the site of the festival was unofficially declared a „national monument.‟ Through the employment of concepts drawn from the writings of French philosopher and historian, Michel Foucault – particularly his earlier archaeological works – and from Sigmund Freud – particularly his metapsychological works – this study has posed two broad sets of questions. Firstly, from a Foucauldian perspective, what have been the conditions for the production of „South Africanness‟ at this festival? What have been the requirements, the discursive „rules of the game‟ for whiteness and Afrikanerness to become „South African‟? To what extent does this constitution of the festival as a „South African‟ event preserve older lines of division, difference and oppression? To what extent does this bring about meaningful social change? Secondly, from a psychoanalytic perspective, what are the fantasies constellated in the discourse of the festival as a „South African‟ event? Who, in these fantasies, is constituted as the „other of the post-apartheid nation‟? How has fantasy provided a kind of „hallucinatory gratification,‟ a phantasmatic compensation for, and a means of conserving, the losses of privilege in the new nation? And how has fantasy oriented the festival towards post-apartheid sociality, soliciting identifications with the post-apartheid nation? The overarching argument proposed is that anti-apartheid post-apartheid nation building has cultivated a melancholic loss of apartheid for whites in general and Afrikaners in particular, a loss that cannot be grieved – indeed, a loss that should not be grieved – and, as such, a grief that takes on an unconscious afterlife. Apartheid and the life it enabled – not only racialised privilege, but also a structure of identification and idealisation, of being and having – becomes a loss that is buried in, and by, the injunctions issued to post-apartheid memory and conduct. Without the discursive resources with which to symbolise this loss, disguised repetitions of the past, a neurotic refinding of the lost objects of apartheid, and melancholia are the likely outcomes, each of which engender a set of exclusions and enjoyments that run along old and new lines.
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  • Date Issued: 2012

Mahatma Gandhi : a psychobiographical study

- Pillay, Koneshverrie

  • Authors: Pillay, Koneshverrie
  • Date: 2009
  • Subjects: Mahatma Gandhi Institute (Mauritius) , Psychology -- Biographical methods , Psychoanalysis , Developmental psychology
  • Language: English
  • Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
  • Identifier: vital:9890 , http://hdl.handle.net/10948/1159 , Mahatma Gandhi Institute (Mauritius) , Psychology -- Biographical methods , Psychoanalysis , Developmental psychology
  • Description: The study is of a psychobiographical nature, employing a psychological theory as a paradigm within which to uncover the narrative of an individual’s life. There are relatively few studies of this nature, particularly with a South African focus. The study applied a qualitative psychobiographical research method which aimed to describe Mahatma Gandhi's psychological development according to Erik Erikson’s (1950) Psychosocial Developmental Theory. Mohandas Karamchund Gandhi or Mahatma Gandhi as he was generally known was a major political and spiritual leader. Although much has been written on his life, a psychobiography has not yet been written. He was chosen as the research subject through purposive sampling on the basis of interest value, uniqueness and significance of his life. The data collection and analysis was conducted according to Yin’s (1994) ‘analytic generalization’ which incorporated Erikson’s theory of psychosocial stages. Alexander’s (1988) nine proposed guidelines assisted in the process of data analysis. The study concluded that Gandhi had attained the ego virtues of hope, will, purpose, competence, fidelity love, care and wisdom as proposed by Erikson’s (1950) Psychosocial Developmental Theory within the delineated age frame.
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  • Date Issued: 2009

Obedient daughter, silenced witch: the hysteric in Freudian psychoanalysis

- Roux, Catharina

  • Authors: Roux, Catharina
  • Date: 1989
  • Subjects: Freud, Sigmund, 1856-1939 -- Criticism and interpretation , Hysteria , Psychoanalysis , Seduction
  • Language: English
  • Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
  • Identifier: vital:3117 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1004637 , Freud, Sigmund, 1856-1939 -- Criticism and interpretation , Hysteria , Psychoanalysis , Seduction
  • Description: This study explores the theoretical consequences of Freud's renunciation of the seduction theory. The dissertation defends the thesis that the seduction theory was shaped as much by Freud's adherence to the nomonological model as by the empirical evidence of child sexual abuse. A renunciation of the seduction theory was inevitable, not because the accounts of the daughters were lies, but because the methodology was inappropriate. The nomonological model obscured the emotional structure of the nuclear family in which the structure itself, through which sexuality emerged, directed the girl's entrance into womanhood and caused the woman's dis-ease. Freud's methodology forced him to isolate an event as cause of an illness and to attribute the event to an agent. The universal perversity of the Victorian father thus became the central theme around which an explanation of a female disease was built. When this theme became theoretically untenable, Freud renounced the seduction theory and, still using the nomonological model, built up the construct of the Oedipus complex in which the father was vindicated. In order to exonerate the father, the transactions through which the child's libido developed were represented as originating in inherent tendencies. As a result, the hierarchical nature of the interaction between parent and child was distorted, and this led to the formulation of the distinction between real events and fantasies as a basic premise on which the difference between the pleasure principle and the reality principle rests. This formulation gave rise to the sharp duality between fantasy and reality which eventually compelled him to separate psychic reality and social reality. The theoretical structure built on this duality could not but fuse hysteria, masochism and "normal" femininity into an explanation of the female state, and obscure the essential social relations between men and women which were structured in terms of dominance and submission. The thesis traces the journey from the perverted father as cause of a female disease, hysteria, to the theoretical conjunction of masochism and hysteria. It comes to the conclusion that Freud's model is unable to explain the self-mutilation of the hysteric; nor is it capable of explaining the hysteric's refusal to participate in the circuit of symbolic exchanges which constituted Victorian society. The study further attempts to understand hysteria in terms of the complex interlacing of fact and fantasy and tries to show that fantasy was rooted in the facts of Victorian culture.
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  • Date Issued: 1989

Theory in interpretive psychology - with special reference to Paul Ricoeur's interpretation of Freud

- Du Toit, Barry

  • Authors: Du Toit, Barry
  • Date: 1988
  • Subjects: Freud, Sigmund, 1856-1939 , Ricœur, Paul , Psychoanalysis
  • Language: English
  • Type: text , Thesis , Masters , MA
  • Identifier: vital:2906 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002071
  • Description: The thesis aims to show that, while an interpretive psychology is not compatible with theory as it occurs in the predictive- causal explanation of the natural sciences, it is both possible and necessary to develop a concept of theory valid within an interpretive methodology. These claims are advanced in the course of an examination of Ricoeur 's interpretation of Freudian psychoanalysis. After examining some traditional ways in which phenomenological psychology has responded to the psychoanalytic challenge, the thesis presents an interpretation of Freudian psychoanalysis as a hermeneutic approach which utilized theoretical constructions in a productive way, although distorted by Freud's natural-scientific self- understanding. Freud's causal-explanatory language and natural- scientific meta theory are shown to be significant inasmuch as they provide a vehicle for theory construction in psychoanalysis. However, since the theory is modeled on that of the natural sciences, it proves incompatible with the interpretive aspects of Freud's approach. We then establish a concept of theory and of causal analysis which is different to that of the natural sciences, and is compatible with, and indeed founded in, an interpretive approach to psychology. These concepts are then illustrated in the context of psychoanalysis. In the final chapter the advantages of the use of theory in interpretive psychology are discussed.
  • Full Text:
  • Date Issued: 1988
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