The girl you describe has suffered a trauma that could be
well-related to a mid- to high-level type of post traumatic stress syndrome, or
PTSD.
Since she suffered this accident during her teenage
years, you must consider that her frontal lobe is close to the last stages of full
development, since it is one of the latest corpus' to fully
grow.
Applying theory, you could say that she has made a
connection between the negative experience of crashing and the normal experience of
driving hence making a normal experience tainted with
negativity.
The theorist that used these type of
experiences as ways to study development was B.F. Skinner. One of his hypothesis within
his theory of behavior is averse stimuli. This is likely what happened to that girl: The
stimulus for driving has turned aversive due to her
accident.
What could be predicted about her growth process
is that she would have to resolve this fear through desensitisation and through behavior
modification in therapy where the experience is brought up (along with all its negative
instances) so that all the affect that comes with it is controlled
systematically.
However, if she does NOT resolve the
situation, she would have what Erickson deemed a gap in psychosocial development that
will lead to further misses in her social growth process as a result of her inability to
make a normal connection to a normal necessity which is to transport oneself from one
place to another.
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