Psychological Counseling Session for Wile

PSYCHOLOGICAL COUNSELING SESSION FOR WILE E. COYOTE Presenting Problem: Wile E. Coyote is a male coyote (Desertous-operativus Idioticus or Overconfidentii vulgaris) is a late-middle-age male, born in 1949, who has appeared in a televised Warner Bros. cartoon series since 1966. For more than four decades, the patient has continually exposed himself to risk of extreme physical injury (even death) pursuing a road runner (Disappearialis quickies or Tastyus supersonicus) compulsively across the deserts of Arizona and other southwestern states.

History of Presenting Problem: The patient has suffered from the presenting problem for most of his adult life and has been so consumed with this fixation that he has remained a lone nomad, living in caves and holes in the ground instead of establishing a stable residence and a family.

During that time, the patient has also suffered dozens of catastrophic falls from great heights and other accidents, including being crushed, stretched, flattened, punctured, dragged for miles, turned into a spring, and explosively detonated, all from his failed attempts to kill a rival. Ostensibly, the purpose of this pursuit (at least in the patient's mind) is the ego-based need to eat. However, it is apparent that the patient has been sustaining himself nutritionally for decades without eating the road runner.

Therefore, at the outset of therapy, it was assumed that there must be some other explanation for the patient's obsession with the road runner. Description of Personality within Freudian Theoretical Framework: According to the patient, he was the youngest pup of a litter of four and was continually "picked on" by his littermates and mocked by his father for his failure to learn how to hunt as well as his brothers.

There is evidence to suggest that a substantial amount of this treatment occurred when the patient was transitioning from the anal stage of psychosexual development to the phallic stage, as the patient consciously remembers elements of his Oedipal fixation and his feelings of rivalry with respect to his father.

Likewise, it seems that the patient may also have sublimated repressed his anger at and maybe a perpetual rivalry with at his father by dedicating his entire life to achieving the one accomplishment that his neither his father nor any of his siblings ever achieved: catching a road runner. Furthermore, it would seem that the patient is mainly driven by ego-based issues; specifically, he has devoted his life to fulfilling the definitions established by his father and family of origin of personal worth.

Consequently, he has over-valued the goal of catching the road runner far beyond its actual worth as a meal. The fact that much of the ridicule to which he was exposed during his psychosocial developmental stages occurred during the anal phase is consistent with his rigid focus and his obsession with perfection in the.