Case History and Theoretical Strips

¶ … Theoretical Strips Tracy is a thirteen-year-old, Caucasian female, who is being raised by her mother, Melanie in Los Angeles. Also living in the home is Tracy's older brother Mason, who is fifteen. Tracy's parents are divorced, with Melanie as custodial parent. Tracy is in regular contact by telephone with her father, Travis, who is now remarried with a new baby.

Travis is employed with a decent salary but has suffered periods of unemployment in the past; Melanie is a high-school dropout who receives child support but otherwise makes a basic subsistence income as a hairdresser for children and women, operating out of her own home. She is a recovering alcoholic who attends weekly A.A. meetings, but most of her social circle is from the recovery movement.

For example, Melanie's boyfriend Brady, who is about ten years younger than Melanie but still substantially older than the children, also regularly stays at the Freelands' home overnight. Brady, who is a drug abuser and has been in and out of halfway houses, has an uneasy relationship with Tracy at best. Tracy was referred to us by the social workers at Portola Middle School in Los Angeles, where she is in the seventh grade.

Her mother Melanie had been disturbed by the behavioral changes that had manifested themselves in her daughter over the past four months, since the start of the school year.

Melanie recalled her description to Travis over the phone of the behavioral changes in Tracy: "It's different this time -- she's starting to scare me." The changes in Tracy began after her return to Portola at the end of the summer, and at first seemed related merely to a desire to "fit in": Melanie's limited budget means that Tracy's clothing is typically bought used at thrift shops and flea markets, and Tracy's initial social anxiety seemed related to her clothing. But the real difficulty began with Tracy's friendship with Evie.

Evie is also in the seventh grade at Portola, and is in foster care with foster mother Brooke.

Tracy's brother Mason, who is older but also a student in the same school system, described Evie as "the hottest girl at Portola." It is clear that Evie is sexually very advanced for her age: she reports physical and sexual abuse in childhood from an uncle, who "put things inside me" and "pushed me into a fire." After initially mocking Tracy about her clothing, Evie eventually befriended Tracy, and enticed Tracy into a host of antisocial behaviors.

Evie would shoplift, which led Tracy to steal a woman's wallet in an attempt to impress her new friend. Evie encouraged Tracy to get her tongue pierced, then explained how to hide it from her mother. Evie would also introduce Tracy to substance abuse, encouraging her to try alcohol, marijuana, snorting crushed pharmaceuticals and inhaling "whippets" (nitrous oxide). These sessions would turn disturbing when Tracy and Evie, impressed with the anaesthetic properties of the whippets, took turns hitting each other in the face, drawing blood.

Tracy's friendship with Evie was close, and to a certain degree erotic -- the girls would engage in tongue-kissing with each other, and would join up in performing a joint lesbian seduction act for Luke, a friend of Tracy's brother in his early 20s, and attempting (at Evie's instigation) to entice him into a menage a trois.

(Luke rejected the offer as being quite obviously illegal.) Once Melanie discovered the tongue- and navel-piercings which Tracy had managed to hide from her, she called Travis and asked him to take custody of Tracy. Travis came over to talk to the girl, but was unable to take her -- a fact Tracy found both predictable and depressing on her father's part. In this time period, Tracy's academic performance at Portola plummeted.

Meanwhile Tracy's relationship with Evie progressed to a point where it was clear that Evie's design was to convince Melanie to remove her from foster care, and allow her to live in the home. Melanie initially agreed but eventually met with Evie's foster mother and returned the girl. This prompted a serious rupture in the friendship, in which Evie publicly humiliated Tracy at school, and then spread rumors about Tracy which led to students threatening violence against Tracy.

However, Evie's stash of drugs was discovered by Brooke, and Evie claimed it belonged to Tracy. Brooke then informed Melanie, leading her to discover the stolen cash which Tracy has. Brooke and Melanie confronted the two girls, and Evie managed to blame all of the antisocial behavior on Tracy. It was during this confrontation that the final fact which led Tracy to be referred to the social workers at Portola emerged.

Before even the friendship with Evie started, Tracy had been engaged in self-cutting behavior, which she managed to hide from parents, teachers, and friends by wearing long sleeved clothing. She would utilize sterile sharp objects ranging from medical scissors to razor blades. Tracy's mother and brother were unaware of the self-cutting, however Evie was aware, although Tracy never discussed it with her.

Tracy was thereafter referred to social workers and school psychologists at Portola, who then referred her case to us, so that we could address the question of how theoretical approaches in social work practice might be used to interpret her situation. The previous summary of Catherine Hardwicke's film "Thirteen" gives some sense of what is at stake in the life of thirteen-year-old Tracy Freeland.

But from the standpoint of a social worker, it is useful to examine the details of Tracy's situation and attempt to interpret them by means of various theories. I would like to examine Tracy's case more closely through the lens provided by different theoretical approaches. First, I will examine Tracy according to general systems theory, then according to the psychological theories of Sigmund Freud in their classical and contemporary manifestations, and finally (from the alternative theories which have only emerged quite recently) according to feminist standpoint theory.

I will conclude by evaluating the usefulness of these theories themselves, both as a tool for understanding Tracy and more generally. Using general systems theory to approach Tracy's case is mostly a matter of common sense -- general systems theory is less of a procrustean theoretical bed for which case studies must be cut to fit, but is instead a useful tool for conceptual analysis.

Greene (2008) notes that the origins of general systems theory came initially from the biological sciences, and thus is different from other theories under consideration because "its highly abstract set of assumptions or rules can be applied to many fields of study to understand systemic change" -- Greene additionally observes that the originators of general systems theory think that it is "not a theory at all, but a working hypothesis, the main function of which is to provide a theoretical model for explaining, predicting, and controlling phenomena" (Greene 165).

Social systems theory is readily applicable to Tracy's case: it merely asks us to conceive of Tracy as a part of an organic social system whose interrelated members constitute a single sort of unit, like a family. The system is defined by its "limits" -- the boundaries which define it, or which indicate its membership. Without this there is no way of attaining what Schriver (2010) calls "familiness," the sense that there is an existent and working system in place there which constitutes the family (303).

So in the case of Tracy's family it is important to realize that to a certain extent there are members of it who lie beyond those boundaries. Brady is not really a member of Tracy's family, certainly not in Tracy's eyes: he is not married to her mother, and his past transgressions are traumatic enough to Tracy that she inadvertently flashes back to visualizing it.

The fact that Melanie forgave Brady for his drug abuse and welcomed him back into her home and her bed may be one reason why Tracy should elect to make drug use part of her acting-out behavior. Evie may supply her with the means, but the motive could very well be a means of expressing Tracy's real feelings about her mother's relationship with Brady.

Tracy will, in fact, verbalize certain feelings to her mother about the relationship, but then it is mostly as a way of upbraiding her mother for her failure to cope (financially and emotionally) when Brady's drug abuse removed him from her home and placed him in the halfway house: "When Brady went to the halfway house, what happened to our phone? Our cable? You couldn't even pay the bills." In the context of the larger argument which Tracy and Melanie are having when this admission is made -- which is a confrontation about Tracy's drug use and theft -- this might be mistaken for mere defensive lashing out.

But it is clear that Brady's presence troubles Tracy very much indeed -- she is openly hostile to him, inquiring about the halfway house with no euphemism, and as a way to shame him for his past transgressions. She complains to her mother about his presence in the bathroom. She clearly does not want him in the same house.

But the main point made by social systems theory in analyzing this aspect of Tracy's behavior is to emphasize that there is no single answer to how it should be understood: the family system in this case should be understood as unique, with its own set of intertangled relationships with recognizable patterns, but also as a part of a larger social system.

Indeed, Hardwicke's film is careful to contextualize the drug abuse of the older characters, Melanie and Brady in particular, as part of the larger social system of the recovery movement more generally. Melanie inadvertently offends Tracy when she is distracted from listening to the poem Tracy wrote for school, highly praised by her teacher, because Melanie needs to attend an A.A. meeting -- she also participates in A.A.

rituals, referring to a birthday cake she baked for Mario (whom we never otherwise meet) who is having his twelve-year sobriety birthday at A.A. This is, of course, a very clearly defined system with its own rules and procedures, and the film does not need to do any more than allude to them in order to suggest an entire social macro-system (and way of thinking about drug use and addiction) that is entailed beyond the micro-system of this particular family, and its problems with drug abuse.

But it is important also to recall that social systems, according to this theory, are adaptive. Melanie's entrance into A.A. was presumably an adaptation to her own alcoholism, which introduced her to a structured social support network. But at the same time, the individual members of her own family system, including Tracy, would be expected to adapt to the fact of her addiction and recovery.

Indeed, it is the failure of Melanie to adapt to Brady's drug-related absence by holding herself together financially and emotionally that Tracy thinks is the best way of attacking her mother. It would be possible, therefore, to read Tracy's behavior in any number of ways, as seeking to transgress the limits of her family system so as to bring about a change -- the theory sees systems, including families, as goal oriented.

So we could also use this theory to suggest that Tracy's transgressions, with drugs and otherwise, are more generally oriented in an attempt to bring her father back into the family system which he has otherwise abandoned, and now only plays a very remote and diminished role in (largely over the telephone). The fact is that Tracy's acting out does force Melanie into calling Travis, and asking him to take custody.

He does not, but the fact that he appears to talk to Tracy in person may very well have been part of her own goal in pushing the limits to the system comprised by her immediate family. Of course general systems theory is slightly vague, and offers no preconceptions about how to approach the question of Tracy's psychological motivation.

But in this arena there are a number of competing theories to choose from -- this discussion will concentrate on the classically Freudian, and the contemporary versions of Freud's thought currently in use in social work. For Freud, the basic structure of the mind is divided into conscious and unconscious motivations, and behavior should be understood as the result of the interaction between the two. It is important to understand that Freud's unconscious is not the same as automatic (or Pavlovian) sorts of motivation.

Freud (1963) himself is careful to distinguish it from instinct, stating "I am in fact of the opinion that the antithesis of conscious and unconscious is not applicable to instincts. An instinct can never become an object of consciousness -- only the idea that represents the instincts can. Even in the unconscious, more-over, an instinct cannot be represented otherwise than by an idea." (177).

Rather than concentrate on chemical or behavioral aspects of addiction, for example, Freudian theory would look at Tracy and Melanie and ask why it is that Melanie finds it impossible to hide her cigarette smoking from Tracy (although she apparently tries), whereas Tracy finds it effortlessly easy at first to hide her smoking and drug use from Melanie. This is a question of psychology rather than chemical dependency, and Freud would note that Melanie is quite obviously involved with A.A.

And refuses to drink, which means that she is consciously aware of issues of addiction. On the conscious level, Melanie is aware that smoking itself is an addiction (although one that A.A. does not address) -- but in her subconscious, Melanie's guilt over how her alcohol abuse might have affected her own children means that she has an unconscious desire to be discovered, confronted, stopped, or shamed by those children.

As Gardner (1991) defines it, Freud's "dynamic unconscious is a source of motivation, specifically motivation that is actually or potentially a cause of mental conflict, and that it makes little or no positive contribution to cognition" (137). Therefore, Melanie goes through the conscious effort of trying to hide the cigarettes, but her unconscious gives away her own conflicted motivation.

Likewise, the Freudian interpretation of the systems theory analysis given earlier -- in which perhaps Tracy's drug use represents an attempt to get her father's attention -- would emphasize that this is an unconscious motivation on Tracy's part. Freud of course proposes a structure to the unconscious, dividing it into the id, the ego, and the super-ego: the id here is basically animal instinct, and the ego is basically immediate personal desire and awareness.

But the superego corresponds to what we would normally term "conscience," or whatever factor it is that imposes upon self-gratification behavior by invoking a sense of restraint (whether due to guilt or fear of retribution or some other manifestation of conscience). Thurschwell (2000) defines the Freudian superego by noting "The fear of the father's power becomes the baby's super-ego, the internal voice which stops the child from doing things he shouldn't have done when he does do them." (48).

In Tracy's conscious thirteen-year-old mind, the drug use is mostly associated with peer pressure and the immediacy of her relationship with Evie -- it is only unconsciously that Tracy would be participating in this behavior as part of a general campaign to get her mother's attention, and perhaps to necessitate a crisis that will bring her father back to the house (which, eventually, she does). It might even be possible to associate that desire with unconscious sexual motivation.

Certainly as Orbach (2009) notes: "An old-fashioned Freudian would be inclined to view a person who cuts her body as responding to unresolved sexual dilemmas. The phenomenon of cutting was not that widespread until twenty years ago, and an off-the-shelf Oedipal explanation was seen to suffice. But today, with the explosion of cutting behaviour, I think we need a more open approach. Yes, cutting oneself might be sexual in origin, but equally it could be a way of enacting a violence that the woman or girl has experienced." (148).

Orbach is writing within the Freudian tradition, but offering a useful correction from the standpoint of later corrections and thus counts as a revisionary or contemporary use of Freudian theory. Contemporary Freudian theory in social work bears very little relation to the classic Freudian approach of psychoanalysis. Goldstein (1995) is a useful guide to how contemporary social work would use Freudian theory to come to an understanding of Tracy's case, by inquiring into sense of "ego identity" (94).

This takes special notice of the fact that Tracy, at age thirteen, is in the midst of a "rapid growth spurt along with dramatic physiological changes that upset the balance that has been achieved and present new coping demands" (93). Because ego identity, in Freud's terms, "involves the integration of one's past, present and future; consequently it also entails the integration of past identifications with others into a whole that repreesnts one's unique self" (94).

In other words, we are asked to consider Tracy's behavior in light of her ability to hold together a coherent sense of self in light of her uncertainty about the future, but also the need to make sense of traumas of the past, including her parents' divorce and her mother's collapse after the relationship with Brady hit rock-bottom. The problem of role confusion is considerable when internal and external resources are not sufficient to help an individual consolidate his or her identity.

The individual who comes into adolescence with little sense of competence and who faces keen competition in his or her academic or vocational life may experience severe frustration and reinforcement of low self-esteem… In this respect adolescents who suffer from role confusion often may adopt dysfunctional or antisocial behavior as a way of achieving some type of identity, even a negative one, that is, an identity considered undesirable by one's family or by society. (94) This seems directly applicable as a theory to Tracy's specific case.

It asks us to read Tracy's entire behavioral pattern over the four months depicted in the film as an attempt to achieve a stable identity in the midst of instability. The fact that Tracy is willing to do this through a "negative" identity seems to be due to the example of Evie, but it is clear that Tracy has secretly been definining her own "negative" but secret identity through the cutting before Evie was introduced.

The fact that the cutting worsens as the relationship with Evie grows more dramatic just seems to indicate that the cutting represents, for Tracy, a form of stability in the midst of the rapid changes of adolescence. This modified Freudian approach seems like a psychologically richer examination of Tracy's relationship with Evie than would be provided by more strictly behaviorist approaches, such as Albert Bandura's social learning theory.

Bandura believed that these behaviors were clearly learned -- and to some extent, the film's dramatization of Tracy's sudden participation in a new social milieu, including Evie, in which she can learn these things certainly indicates that Bandura is correct up to a point. But what theories like Bandura's do not offer is a reason why Tracy should be seeking to transgress, now, and why she involves herself with Evie in the first place. Indeed, Bandura (1994) has claimed that "Adolescence has often been characterized as a period of psychosocial turmoil.

While no period of life is ever free of problems, contrary to the stereotype of "storm and stress," most adolescents negotiate the important transitions of this period without undue disturbance or discord." (79). A Freudian attention to trauma and unconscious motivation is more appropriate in approaching Tracy's case than this would be. In terms of alternative and postmodern theories, the obvious one to use with connection with Catherine Hardwicke's "Thirteen" and its protagonist Tracy would be some form of feminist theory.

(This is, after all, one of those very rare Hollywood films in which the director, the screenwriter, and the stars are all women, and we might assume some level of feminist consciousness on their part.) Robbins, Chatterjee et al. consider feminist standpoint theory to be on the cutting edge here, to a certain degree (having failed to include it in the first edition of their text). They present it as a theory of "empowerment," although I think this is debatable.

The feminist definition of a "standpoint" according to Swigonski (1994) -- who was the first to propose its relevance to social work -- requires "a level of awareness about an individual's social location, from which certain features of reality come into prominence and from which others are obscured" (390). This involves one's own standpoint as a social worker as well as the standpoint of the person being evaluated.

But Swigonski's real point here is to call attention to the status of women as an oppressed class of persons, and likening it to other oppressed classes. Swigonski admits that the origins of the feminist standpoint theory lie in various Marxist theories, sociological and otherwise.

But she is firm in her emphasis that social work and feminism share certain core values (emphasizing an active role in society, a belief in the dignity and worth of all people, the promotion of growth and development in the self, and a vigilant opposition to forms of discrimination). As a result, Swigonski (1994) will define the meaning of the feminist "standpoint" in these terms: "the less powerful members of society experience a different reality as a consequence of their oppression" (390).

The chief way in which the experience differs is that, in their confrontation with the dominant majority, the oppressed minority is forced into a sort of divided worldview, in which they must take the worldview of the oppressor into account at the same time as they naturally experience their own worldview. As Robbins Chatterjee et al.

will note, this means that oppression can take a form as simple as the failure of the subaltern population to recognize that there is a difference in the ideology of the dominant class, and that this very difference left unrealized itself constitutes a form of psychic oppression. For this reason, feminist standpoint theory considers the marginal to be central.

In terms of applying feminist standpoint theory to the case study in question, Tracy's marginality comes from the fact announced in the title of the film -- she is an adolescent, considered a "minor" legally but also clearly pubescent and in the process of sexual maturation.

The sexual aspect is remarked upon in Hardwicke's film at the first moment we see Tracy returning to school in the autumn -- one of the teenage boys looks at her and comments to his friends, "looks like she grew up this summer," which is of course a euphemistic way to indicate a certain level of sexual objectification that Tracy would not have experienced in the past. But I would like to approach the feminist standpoint theory from a slightly unusual angle, to highlight its broad applicability --.