David Lambeau's Good Will Hunting

Good Will Hunting is, at its core, a story about coming to terms with one’s past and making the difficult decision about what is best for the future. Will Hunting, the protagonist, is a janitor at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). At first glance, he is the typical blue collar worker: a working class lifestyle and a group of friends that do not shy away from violence, vulgarity, or passionate arguments about sports. However, we quickly learn that Will is anything but ordinary. After esteemed professor of mathematics Gerald Lambeau writes an extremely difficult geometric proof on the chalkboard to challenge his students, he is awestruck when he finds out that what took him and his colleagues two years to solve took an unknown individual (soon to be discovered as Will) mere days to complete.
Will slowly starts opening up about his past with orphanages and physical abuse at the hands of his foster parents, and Will’s company in turn aids Sean in beginning to move on from the death of this wife. As Will asserts himself as one of the brightest young minds of anyone he has ever seen, Lambeau begins lining up job offers for Will with elite organizations to put his incredible intellect to use. Sean, however, does not think Will is ready and insists that Will should do what is best for him, even if that means not living up to the expectations set forth by Lambeau. Ultimately, Will comes to terms with his past and uses Sean’s guidance to begin his future in California, where his love interest, Skylar, has moved for graduate school. There are a vast number of interesting social psychology concepts that take place in Good Will Hunting. The two dynamics that stand out as the most significant are the relationship between Sean and Will and how Will perceives and develops his own identity over the course the