This study examined the nature and prevalence of ego strength among early adolescent learners in grade nine attending an independent school. An in-depth literature review was conducted in order to explore the role and theories of ego development. Thereafter, theories and key aspects of various dimensions of adolescent development were highlighted. The empirical investigation included both quantitative and qualitative research methodology. A questionnaire was administered to one hundred and ten grade nine learners in order to obtain a broad measure of the respondents' ego and superego strength. Thereafter, two learners were selected in order to explore their experiential life worlds. The findings of the empirical investigation were compared with information that emerged from the literature study. The study was concluded by offering recommendations to parents, educators and professionals working in the field of psychology of education in empowering them in addressing the phenomenon of ego development among early adolescent learners. / Educational Studies / M. Ed. (Guidance and Counselling)

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No description available.

This explorative case study was undertaken to uncover how transformative self-discoveries were facilitated through Gestalt playtherapy, enabling agency of a single pre-school participant. Data were captured around the participant's baseline agentic status; emerging agency, facilitated trough the intervention and post-intervention agentic status. A content analysis aided thematic coding. Theme 1 identified inherent agency trends and the agency blocks "what is that". Theme 2 dealt with patterns of active resistance "I don't want to feel / I don't want to know". Theme 3 captured enhanced agentic behaviour "I can and I understand". Through the intervention the participant's entrapped agency was unleashed, leading to an awareness of her `being', enabling her `doing' and thereby allowing her to `become'. Enabled agency increased the participant's active involvement in her life and her engagement in developmental tasks was increased. Implications of the findings support further investigation and application of this intervention. / Educational Studies / M. Diac (Play Therapy)

This explorative case study was undertaken to uncover how transformative self-discoveries were facilitated through Gestalt playtherapy, enabling agency of a single pre-school participant. Data were captured around the participant's baseline agentic status; emerging agency, facilitated trough the intervention and post-intervention agentic status. A content analysis aided thematic coding. Theme 1 identified inherent agency trends and the agency blocks "what is that". Theme 2 dealt with patterns of active resistance "I don't want to feel / I don't want to know". Theme 3 captured enhanced agentic behaviour "I can and I understand". Through the intervention the participant's entrapped agency was unleashed, leading to an awareness of her `being', enabling her `doing' and thereby allowing her to `become'. Enabled agency increased the participant's active involvement in her life and her engagement in developmental tasks was increased. Implications of the findings support further investigation and application of this intervention. / Educational Studies / M. Diac (Play Therapy)

This thesis provides the first rigorous history of the concept of midlife crisis. It highlights the close connections between understandings of the life course and social change. It reverses accounts of popularization by showing how an idea moved from the public sphere into academia. Above all, it uncovers the feminist origins of the concept and places this in a historically little-studied tradition of writing about middle age that rejected the gendered "double standard of aging." Constructions of middle age and life-planning were not always oppressive, but often used for feminist purposes. The idea of midlife crisis became popular in the United States with journalist Gail Sheehy's Passages (1976), a critique of Erik Erikson's male-centered model of ego development and psychoanalytic constructions of gender and identity more generally. Drawing on mid-century notions of middle life as the time of a woman's entry into the public sphere, Sheehy's midlife crisis defined the onset of middle age, for men and women, as the end of traditional gender roles. As dual-earner families replaced the male breadwinner model, Passages circulated widely, read by women and men of different generations, including social scientists. Three psychoanalytic experts-Daniel Levinson, George Vaillant, and Roger Gould-rebutted Sheehy by putting forward a male-only concept of midlife as the end of a man's family obligations; they banned women from reimagining their lives. Though this became the dominant meaning of midlife crisis, it was not universally accepted. Feminist scholars, most famously the psychologist and ethicist Carol Gilligan, drew on women's experiences to challenge the midlife crisis, turning it into a sign of emotional instability, immaturity, and egotism. Resonating with widespread understandings of mental health and social responsibility, and confirmed by large-scale surveys in the late 1990s, this relegated the midlife crisis to a chauvinist cliché. It has remained a contested concept for negotiating the balances between work and life, production and reproduction into the present day.