Case Study Of Sue's Eating Disorders

Sue is nineteen years old and she has an eating disorder. The question that needs to be answered is: what is the cause of Sue’s eating disorder? There are three contemporary perspectives in psychology that explain what is happening in Sue’s life and those are psychodynamic, behavioral, and cognitive. They all lead back to the same answer, that her eating disorder is a product of her parent’s fighting and their probable divorce. The first and most prominent of the perspectives that apply to this case study is psychodynamic psychology. This perspective is based on the studies and findings of Sigmund Freud, who was a neurologist that proposed that there is an unconscious mind into which everyone represses their threatening, vulgar urges and

This branch of psychology focuses on memory, intelligence, perception, thought processes, problem solving ability, language and learning (Pearson). It focuses on how people think, remember, store, and use information that they are given (Pearson). Some of the key assumptions are that our behavior can be explained as a series of responses to stimuli and behavior is controlled by our own thought processes as opposed to genetic factors (Introduction). The biggest contributor to this perspective is Ulric Neisser, who is coined the “father of cognitive psychology”. He believed that the human brain worked similarly to how a computer collects data. When he was young he worked with another prominent cognitive psychologist George Miller, who was one of the founders of cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience. One of his most well known discoveries was his research on short term memory and how it is typically limited to only about seven pieces of information at a time. This approach explains how Sue’s life around her can shape her views of herself and cause her to have an eating

Watson. Behaviorism is the “science of behavior” (Pearson) and it disregards the consciousness issue in psychology at the time and focused instead on the observable behavior. Watson believed that all behavior is learned, and he tested that theory with the experiment called “Little Albert”. In the case study, it is stated that her eating disorder started after her parents started fighting her junior year of high school. That would mean the root of her problem originated with her parents