Evidence and Research
Issue 1: Dreams
Freud's theory begins with the concept of repression, a cognitive process through which we deny wishes, fears, and thoughts that are threatening to us (make us anxious). Repression creates an unconscious, an aspect of us that is outside of our waking awareness. The repressed material does not remain static in the unconscious mind because there are no constraints in the unconscious mind, therefore this material can be a source of emotional or unwilled behaviour. The repressed thoughts and fears come forward when we sleep. In Nuray’s case this is her sister’s fear for her life when her father finds out about her love for an older man. This is evident in the article where it says ‘nervous and upset’ and ‘restless’.
Issue 2: Morality and Crime
The article assumes that that the killer has a delayed moral development because he sat “impassively” which assumes that they have no feelings and are lifeless. This strengthens the morality issue. Kohlberg developed a theory of moral development after conducting a longitudinal study on 75 boys from USA, Mexico, Yucatan, Taiwan and Turkey. It included 2 stages in which there were 6 sub stages. The 3 stages were pre-conventional, conventional and post conventional. The difference between these stages was the pre-conventional stage was associated with following the rules. The conventional stage was associated with being good to please someone and the post conventional stage was more to do with self control and what the person wants to do to please them. He said that these stages are invariant so everybody goes through them however criminals have a lower development rate. It seems the murderers have a delayed moral development because they killed their family member due to a cultural reason which they didn’t even question. They carried out the act without any remorse and so their moral development is an issue which the article picked up on.
Issue 3: Death of a family member is stressful
The Social Readjustment Rating Scale was developed by Holmes and Rahe, which assigns values attributed by a sample of 394 people to life events which are stressful. The death of a family member is rated highly on the scale which supports the issue that the death of a family member is stressful. However the scale does not consider the impact of the event on the individual. For example the death of Nuray’s sister could be more stressful because she was murdered by her father and uncles. This makes it more stressful because it was a family member that had murdered her.
Practical Intervention
Evidence suggests that repressed memories are difficult to retrieve. To overcome the nightmares these memories need to be brought forward and resolved. Esterson referred to recovering memories through psychotherapy. Psychotherapy aims to reduce the distress that people face, however the downfall of this method is that at times it has led to false memories being implanted in the patients mind. Alternatively cognitive interviews could be used to resurface the memories. Cognitive interviews involve recreating the context in which the event occurred. This could then lead to Nuray realising that she has nothing to fear and hopefully she will be able to overcome the loss of her sister. However the downside of the cognitive interview is that it would be distressing for Nuray to remember the murder of her sister and so it could have a long term psychological effect.
Gibbs developed a moral reasoning programme which was supposed to help the moral development of criminals. Since the killers have low morality they could be sent to moral reasoning sessions where they learn that what they did was wrong and hopefully develop their morality. The downside of Gibbs programme was that it is not certain if the programme is effective for all types of crimes. It may be that it is not suitable for people who were involved in a moral reasoning programme and instead they need to be sent to other sessions where they can see that how they came to the decision was wrong.
A way for Nuray to overcome the stress is by seeing that what happened was bad luck and that she was not to blame for it. This would mean that Nuray does not see herself as being responsible for her sister’s death and so she can overcome the loss of her sister by being determined to move forward. This theory was developed by Frazier as a result of interviews with rape victims and the most successful adaptation was seen as not blaming themselves.
Bibliography
Websites:
Books:
Freud, S. (1900) cited in Freud, S. (2000) Pg 44-49 The Interpretation Of Dreams, London: Hodder
Kohlberg, L. cited in Gadson, S. (2005) Pg 301-302 Psychology A2 for OCR, London: Heinemann
Holmes and Rahe (1967) cited in Banyard, P (2002) Pg 213-218 Introducing psychological research, London: