A Case Study of Female with Self Confidence

This is a case study for how she gained Self- Confidence. She does suspect that Denise's birth, 18 months after her own, was not planned, but she does not recall being threatened by her sister's arrival in the family, nor does she base this belief on any specific remark of her parents.

About this time, Maggie entered the anal stage, becoming toilet trained and being somewhat preoccupied with her bowel movements. Her mother tells her that she learned to use the bathroom very quickly, and Maggie speculates that this may have been her most significant reaction to the arrival of her sister: by mastering her bodily functions, she was no longer a baby, giving her power over Denise, who now assumed the inferior position in the family. This marked the period in which she was developing her ego, the beginnings of her consciousness of herself as a separate individual.

In Erikson's schema, she was starting the period in which the individual learns to develop autonomy and overcome shame and doubt. She was walking at this point, starting to explore her world on her own. She remembers and has photographs of herself walking through the fenced-in backyard with the family dog, Lizzie. In several of these photographs, she has managed to shed her clothes; rather than make her feel ashamed of her nakedness, her mother laughed and took discrete pictures, but Maggie does remember her mother then gently cautioning her to put on clothes when going outside.

Maggie remembers starting to be aware of herself during this time. Her earliest true memories are from the end of this period, when she was about 3. Before this time, she is uncertain that what she remembers is more than a constructed memory, built on old photographs and family stories.

In the early stages of becoming aware of herself as a person, Maggie was experiencing what Seymour Epstein (1973, May) calls the development of the self-concept, an important step which "organizes the data of experience, particularly experience involving social interaction, into predictable sequences of action and reaction . . . [and] facilitates attempts to fulfill needs while avoiding disapproval and anxiety" (p. 407). Maggie was learning to think of herself as a separate individual, capable of making sense of the world around her and manipulating it to meet her own needs.

The next three years were spent in the phallic stage, during which the superego begins to coalesce. Freud argues that this is the period in which the child begins to establish a sexual role identity, attaching to the same-sex parent and, usually unconsciously, battling the other parent for control in the relationship. Charlie was born during this time, and Maggie remembers her father's delight that he now had a son. She also recalls being secretly happy that her father was distracted by Charlie's arrival, since the experience gave her more of her mother's attention.

In Erikson's view, this is the period of developing initiative and overcome excessive guilt. Erikson does not suggest that, at any critical stage, the child learns to overcome the negative crisis to the extent that it never plays a role in the individual's life again; instead, he is arguing that each stage allows the child to grapple with the crisis and try to master it. Therefore, Maggie's confrontation with the concept of guilt did not relieve her from ever having to feel guilty again; instead, it provided her with a healthy response to the guilt she learned when she failed at what she was attempting or when she discovered herself wishing for outcomes she knew society or her family would not approve. She remembers trying to make paper dolls by cutting up one of Denise's coloring books and later trying to cover up her botched attempts by hiding the scraps of paper under the rug in her bedroom. Her mother punished her but later showed her how to use scissors and glue with plain construction paper to make some simple figures.