Monday, August 22, 2011
PSY202 – Principles of Psychology
In this character analysis paper the character of Jenny Curran from the award winning movie Forrest Gump will be the subject of discussion. This paper will present an analysis of the Jenny’s personality as it is applicable to Psychodynamic theory. The paper will present my rationale for the choice to use the Psychodynamic theory to describe Jenny Curran’s personality. In addition, this paper will present a description of the psychodynamic theory utilizing the work of Sigmund Freud regarding personality development. The paper will contain a description of Jenny Curran, as well as, an analysis of her personality utilizing Psychodynamic theory focusing on structure, process, growth, development, and change. This analysis will indentify psychopathologies, which developed as a result of the Jenny’s life experiences. Furthermore, there will be a description of other variables by the writer, which indentify internal and external factors that contributed to the development of Jenny Curran’s personality.
“Sigmund Freud developed an over-all view of personality in which behavior is a result of struggles among drives and needs that inevitably conflict (Cervone, Pervin, Oliver, 2005 p. 74).” The psychoanalytic theory view is that personality is developed gradually as the individual move through different psychosexual stages: oral, anal, and phallic. Sigmund Freud also theorized that a person operates from three states of being: the id, the superego, and the ego. “The Psychoanalytic theory places enormous emphasis on the role of early life events for later personality development (Cervone, Pervin, Oliver, 2005 p.112).”
Jenny developed fixation in the oral and the anal stages of her psychosexual stage. She acts out in behavior characteristic of those stages to reduce the tension, she was experiencing in her life. Jenny experiences conflict between the id and the ego and