John's Psychodynamic Perspective

John is a 16-year-old who has recently undergone an intervention to address his violent behavior towards both family and strangers. John now finds himself in a residential treatment home, where he receives group and individual therapy sessions. Throughout this paper, I will examine John’s case through the psychodynamic perspective.
The psychodynamic perspective incorporates many ideas from Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory. The psychodynamic approach focuses on the idea that people react and behave for specific reasons. People are often unaware of these reasons, as they often are caused by past events. These past events create the structure for patterns, and people will recreate the same situations for themselves, (Kay, 2006). The person creates patterns and prototypical images, which they use to characterise those around them. It is the therapist’s responsibility to bring to light these patterns. Through the therapist client relationship, the therapist wants to create new ideas and conceptions for the client, replacing the ones formed by past events. I will examine John’s internal and …show more content…
John refuses to talk about his father’s absence or his family in general, which signifies it is a difficult topic for John to discuss. It is unknown when John’s father left the family, so this anxiety could stem from literally losing an important figure in his life. This anxiety could also be from his mother’s lack of presence, who as a single parent worked many hours to support the family and may not have been emotionally or physically available for John. A final theory would be that the simple absence of a father figure in his life felt as though he was missing something important that everyone else had. As a male, it may have also been particularly difficult to lack a male role model within the family. John has experienced some sort of perceived loss, which has caused him