There are classic cases that every psychology student will know when pursuing their degree. These cases have helped increase knowledge of human behavior, the brain, and appropriate research methods. The article compiles 10 famous cases that continue to fascinate us and evolve, as new evidence or new technologies change their interpretation.
David Reimer
Reimer is one of psychology’s most famous patients, losing his penis in a botched circumcision when he was only 8 months old. Psychologist John Money recommended her parents raise him as a girl (Brenda) and subject him to surgeries and hormonal treatments to help her gender reassignment.
Money initially described the experiment as a great success that seemed to support his belief in the important role of socialization, rather than innate factors, in children’s gender identity. However, the reassignment was very problematic and Reimer’s masculinity always came to the surface.
When he was 14, he was told the truth about his past and was helped to reverse the reassignment to become a child again. Reimer would later campaign against gender reassignment for children with genital injuries. There is also a book about his history: written by John Colapinto. Reimer also appears in . Tragically, he committed suicide in 2004, at just 38 years old.
The wild child of Aveyron
He – whom doctor Jean-Marc Itard called Victor – was found emerging from the Aveyron forest in southwestern France in 1800. When found he was around 11 or 12 years old. It is believed that he lived in the jungle for many years. For psychologists and philosophers, Victor was like a “natural experiment” related to the question of nature and nature. How did the lack of human intervention in the first years of life affect you?
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Those who had hoped that Victor would support the notion of the “noble savage,” uncorrupted by modern civilization, were greatly disappointed: the boy was dirty and unkempt, defecated wherever he stood, and was apparently motivated primarily by hunger. Victor acquired celebrity status after being transported to Paris, and Itard began the mission of teaching and socializing the wild child. This program had mixed successes: Victor never learned to speak fluently, could write a few letters, and acquired a very basic understanding of the language.
Autism expert Uta Frith believes Victor may have been abandoned for being autistic, but acknowledges we will never know the truth about his past.
Phineas Gage
One day in 1848, in Central Vermont, Phineas Gage was tamping explosives into the ground to prepare the way for a railroad when he had a terrible accident. The detonation was premature and metal entered his face, reached his brain and exited the top of his head. Incredibly, Gage survived, although his friends and family felt that he had changed profoundly. He seemed apathetic and aggressive, they felt that he was no longer the same Gage. That’s where the story used to end, a classic example of frontal lobe damage affecting personality. However, recently it has of Gage in light of new evidence. It is now believed that he went through rehabilitation and even worked in Chile with horses.
A suggested that most of his right frontal cortex was probably spared. AND shows a very neat Phineas Gage after the accident. However, many psychology books do not mention this new data, according to a .
Little Albert
That was the nickname that the pioneering behavioral psychologist John Watson gave to an 11-month-old baby, in whom, together with his colleague and future wife Rosalind Rayner, he deliberately tried to instill certain fears through a conditioning process. The research, which had dubious scientific quality, was carried out in 1920 and has gained popularity for being so unethical (such a procedure would never be approved in today’s universities).
In recent years, the investigation into little Albert was revived when his true identity was discovered. A group led by Hall Beck of Appalachian University that they had reason to believe that it was Douglas Merritte, the son of a wet nurse in the John Hopkins University where Watson and Rayner were also found. According to this sad report, little Albert was neurologically disabled, compounding the unethical nature of the research, and died at the age of 6 due to hydrocephalus.
However, the report was challenged by a different group led by . They established that little Albert was, most likely, William A. Barger (recorded in his medical records as Albert Barger), the son of another wet nurse. Richard Griggs, a textbook writer, examined this evidence and concluded that it was more credible. Which would mean that little Albert died in 2007 at the age of 87.
H.M.
(known for years as HM in the literature to protect his privacy) developed severe amnesia at the age of 27 following brain surgery to treat epilepsy from which he had suffered since childhood. He was the focus of studies by more than 100 psychologists and neuroscientists and has been mentioned in more than 12,000 articles. Molaison’s surgery involved removing large parts of the hippocampus on both sides of the brain. As a result he ended up being almost unable to store new information in long-term memory (there were some exceptions – for example, after 1963 he was aware that a US president had been assassinated in Dallas).
The extent of Molaison’s deficit was surprising to many experts of the time, since it was already believed that memory was distributed throughout the cerebral cortex. After she died, her brain was carefully cut out, preserved and is part of a digital 3D atlas. Molaison died in 2008.
Victor Leborgne (“Tan”)
The fact that, in most people, the language function is predominantly served by the left prefrontal cortex is now almost common knowledge, at least among psychology students. However, by the early 19th century the consensus view was that language (like memory) was distributed throughout the brain. But one 18th-century patient helped change that belief: Victor Leborgne, a French man nicknamed “Tan” because it was the only sound he could pronounce (aside from the phrase “sacre nom de Dieu”).
In 1861, at the age of 51, Leborgne was referred to the renowned neurologist Paul Broca. He examined his brain and noticed a lesion in the left frontal lobe – a segment of tissue known today as . Given that Leborgne had the aforementioned language disability, but his understanding of it was intact, Broca concluded that this area of the brain was responsible for the production of speech. He then tried to persuade his peers of this – now recognized as a key moment in the history of psychology.
For decades, little was known about Leborgne, other than his important contribution to science. However, in a, Cezary Domanski of the Maria Curie-Sklodowska University in Poland, discovered new biographical details. One of those details is the possibility that Leborgne murmured the word “Tan” because her birthplace, Moret, was home to many tanneries.
Kim Peek
Peek, who died in 2010 at the age of 58, was the inspiration for the character of Dustin Hoffman, a man with genius syndrome (savant) in the film rain man. Before that film, which was released in 1988, few people had heard of autism, so Peek can be credited through the film for helping to raise awareness about the condition. However, the film also helped spread the popular and misguided idea that talent is the hallmark of autism.
Peek himself was a non-autistic genius, born with brain abnormalities that included a malformed cerebellum and an absent corpus callosum (i.e., the extensive bundle of nerve fibers that connects both hemispheres). His genius skills were astonishing and included calendar calculation, encyclopedic knowledge of history, literature, classical music, US zip codes, and travel routes. It is estimated that he read more than 12,000 books in his lifetime. His memory was impeccable. Although sociable and outgoing, Peek had coordination problems and abstract and conceptual thinking were a challenge for him.
Anna O.
This was the pseudonym of Bertha Pappenheim, a pioneering German Jewish feminist and social worker, who died in 1936 at the age of 77. Anna O. is known as one of the first patients to undergo psychoanalysis. Her case inspired much of Freud’s thinking on mental disorders. Pappenheim’s case was first presented to another psychoanalyst, , in 1880 when he was called to her home in Vienna where she lay in bed, almost entirely paralyzed. Her other symptoms included hallucinations, personality changes and slurred speech, but doctors could not find physical causes.
For 18 months, Breuer visited her almost daily and talked with her about her thoughts and feelings, including grieving for her father. The more she talked, the more the symptoms seemed to ease – this was apparently one of the first instances of psychoanalysis. However, the degree of Breuer’s success has been debated and some historians believe that Pappenheim did have an organic illness (epilepsy).
Although Freud never met Pappenheim, he wrote about her case, including the notion that she had a hysterical pregnancy, although this is also debated. The last part of Pappenheim’s life in Germany after 1888 is as extraordinary as the story of Anna O. She became a prolific writer and social pioneer: she wrote stories, plays and translated seminar texts, she also founded social clubs for Jewish women, worked in orphanages and founded the German Federation for Jewish Women.
Kitty Genovese
Sadly, it is not really Kitty Genovese who became one of psychology’s classic case studies, but rather the terrible event in which she was the protagonist. In 1964, in New York, Genovese was returning home from her job as a waitress when she was attacked and eventually murdered by Winston Mosely. What made this tragedy so important in psychology was that it inspired research into what became known as the Bystander Phenomenon. That is, the now well-established discovery that our sense of individual responsibility is diluted by the presence of other people.
According to history, 38 people observed the death of…