Preview

Jenny's Personality; Interpretation of Forrest Gump

Powerful Essays
Open Document
Open Document
1418 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Jenny's Personality; Interpretation of Forrest Gump
Forrest Gump: Jenny’s Personality

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

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    Sigmund Freud was born in 1856 and died in 1940. Freud studied the personality of humans. Freud describes three major systems of the human personality. Sigmund Freud’s structural model is as follows: 1. the id holds the human sexual and aggression energy driven by impulses and characterized by a human’s primary thinking (Kowalski & Westen, 2011). 2. The superego explains a human’s conscience and a major source of ideas established through a person’s identity (Kowalski & Westen, 2011). 3. The ego describes a person’s desires, morality, and desires (Kowalski & Westen, 2011). Sigmund Freud’s psychosexual development suggest in the first five years the human personality begins. Zero to one is the oral stage of development. Children from zero to one gain the most gratification from sucking than from biting and chewing food and sometimes other objects. In stage one through three describes the anal stage. During the anal stage children seem to gain gratification from defecation through the…

    • 1125 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Themes of Miracle Polish

    • 1937 Words
    • 8 Pages

    The themes of this short story include jealousy, obsession with narcissism and the emergence of another identity. In this short story, jealousy is displayed when Monica has the narrator choose between the real her and the Monica in the mirror. In the story, “Once, she said, “You know, sometimes I think you like me better there”—she pointed to a mirror—“than here”—she pointed to herself. She said it teasingly, with a little laugh, but in her look was an anxious question.” The Monica in the mirror was described in this excerpt: “a fresh Monica, a vibrant Monica, a Monica with a glow of pleasure in her face. She was dressed in clothes that no longer seemed a little drab, a little elderly, but were handsomely understated, seductively restrained.” The real Monica is depicted in the excerpt “Not for a moment did the mirror make her look young, or beautiful, for she was not young and she was not beautiful. But it was as if some inner constriction had dissolved, some sense of her drifting gradually into unhappiness.” Jealousy is what drove the…

    • 1937 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Freud’s theory was one of personality / psychoanalytic, Freud is famous for his psychosexual theory of development which is used to explain unconscious thoughts or actions. Freud’s theories suggested that there were three parts that made up our personality. The “id” the “ego” and the “super-ego”. The id is the instinctive part of a child’s personality, this is said to…

    • 770 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    In the movie Forrest Gump, Jenny is such a misunderstood person and in no way the evil woman many make her out to be. She is just a lost soul trying to find a place in this world where she belongs and can be happy. She has a hard time thinking she deserves to be happy and loved. Although she mistreats Forrest time and time again, it is not her intention to hurt him the way she does. The way she acts and the decisions she makes all stem from the abuse she went through as a child, then just continues to snowball from there.…

    • 1236 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    Sigmund Freud (born 6 May 1856, died 23 September 1939) is an Austrian neurologist who became known as the founding father of psychoanalysis. When he was young, Sigmund Freud’s family moved from Frieberg, Moravia to Vienna where he would spend most of his life. His parents taught him at home after entering him in Spurling Gymnasium, where he was first in his class and graduated Summa cum Laude. After studying medicine at University of Vienna, Freud worked and gained respect as a physician. Through his work with respected French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, Freud became fascinated with the emotional disorder known as hysteria. Freud believed that adult personality problems were the result of early experiences in life. He believed that we go through five stages of psychosexual development and that at each stage of development we experience pleasure in one part of the body than in others. Erogenous zones are parts of the body that have especially strong pleasure-giving qualities at particular stages of development. Freud thought that our adult personality is determined by the way we resolve conflicts between these early sources of pleasure - the mouth, the anus and the genitals - and demands of reality. Fixation is the psychoanalytic defense mechanism that occurs when the individual remains locked in an earlier development stage because needs are under or over gratified.…

    • 1751 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Theories of Personality

    • 1015 Words
    • 5 Pages

    Psychoanalytic perspective is based on Sigmund Frued perspectives about early experiences it focuses on the importance of the unconscious mind which contains thoughts, wishes, feelings and memories/past experiences in which we are unaware of. The id operates on the pleasure principle by satisfying basic urges, needs, and desires. Ego operates on the reality principle, satisfies the id’s desires in ways that it will cause pleasure instead of pain. Superego strives for perfection, positive feelings and negative feelings of guilt. These three systems were interactions of Frued’s view of personality structure. Freud perspective also focused on psychosexual stages which is the childhood stages of development. Defense mechanisms are methods of reducing anxiety. This perspective could account for the development of introverted and an extroverted personality…

    • 1015 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    The psychoanalytic perspective speaks too how childhood and early development as well as unconscious thinking shape a person's personality. Sigmund Freud was that founder of psychoanalysis. Freud felt that humans behaved a certain way based on the preconscious, the conscious and the unconscious mind. He felt not only were the things we were aware of shaping our behavior but that their were inner forces that we weren’t aware of (unconscious mind) that controlled our behaviors even though we didn’t know they were there.…

    • 645 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Personalities are often very hard to figure out. Each person has a unique and sometimes complex personality and sometimes they do not mix with others. Different psychologists have different theories as to why people are the way they are. One theory is the psychoanalytic theory. Psychoanalytic theory digs into a person’s mind to find out where their problems stem from. The theories stem from childhood and then dig deep into who each person is as an adult. The following reflects on the theories of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung and Alfred Adler; they all have similarities, yet are completely different.…

    • 1863 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    The psychodynamic approach was proposed by Freud. This approach towards personality is based on the notion of underlying forces such as the id, ego and superego which are either present from birth or develop during childhood shape our behaviour and personality as such. Experiences in childhood are proposed to be the basis of human personality, according to Freud and as such Psychodynamic theory proposes that some undesirable unbalances between the id and superego can create the arising of ego defence mechanisms which explain individual differences in behaviour. Freudian theory has been adapted by neo-Freudians, however while psychodynamic theories and treatments from which are still often used and widely known across the world, other theories of personality offer completely different approaches to human individuality and explanations diverge and provide weaknesses for Psychodynamic theory.…

    • 1697 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    Psychodynamic Perspectives- view personality as being primarily unconscious and as developing in stages. Psychodynamic theorists believe that behavior is merely a surface characteristic and that to truly understand someone’s personality we have to explore the symbolic meanings of behavior and the deep inner workings of the mind. These ideas were sketched by the architect of psychoanalytic theory-Sigmund Freud. Most psychodynamic perspectives emphasize that early experiences with parents play an important role in sculpting the individual’s personality. Freud believed the personality had three structures. (The id, the ego, and the super-ego). The id consists of instincts and is the reservoir of psychic energy. It is unconscious and has no contact with reality. The id always seeks pleasure. The ego, deals with demands of reality. The ego abides by the reality principle; it checks the demands of the id for pleasure against what is possible into the real world. The ego helps us to test reality, to see how far we can go in satisfying our desires without getting into trouble and hurting ourselves. The super-ego is the moral branch of personality. It is what we often refer to as our “conscience”. Like the id, the superego does not consider reality; it only considers whether the id’s sexual and aggressive impulses can be satisfied in moral terms. Some psychoanalysts who followed Freud, embracing his core ideas about personality, soon took issue with some aspects of his theory. Dissenters questioned his ideals about sexuality, early experience, social factors, and the unconscious mind.…

    • 882 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    For Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), founder of the psychoanalytic movement, personality consisted of; the ID, the Ego and the Superego, all of which he believed guide our behavior to an extent. During the 1920's, psychoanalysis developed as a theoretical system for understanding all of human motivation and personality, not just a treatment for the mentally disturbed.…

    • 1243 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Object Relations Theory

    • 14765 Words
    • 60 Pages

    Freud, S. (1961). Inhibitions, symptoms and anxiety. In J. Strachy (Ed. and Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 20). London: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1926) Freud, S. (1961). Civilization and its discontents. In J. Strachy (Ed. and Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 21). London: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1930) Freud, S. (1961). An outline of psycho-analysis. In J. Strachy (Ed. and Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 23). London: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1940) Feist, J. (1990). Theories of personality. Fort Worth: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Fenichel, O. (1945). The psychoanalytic theory of neurosis. New York: W. W. Norton. Hartmann, H. (1958). Ego psychology and the problem of adaptation. New York: International Universities Press. Monroe, R. (1955). Schools of psychoanalytic thought. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Moore, B. E., & Fine, B. D. (1968). A glossary of psychoanalytic terms and concepts. New York: American Psychoanalytic Association. Rapoport, D. (1960). The structure of psychoanalytic theory. Psychological Issues, 2 (2).…

    • 14765 Words
    • 60 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    Forrest Gump, otherwise labeled as below average due to his extremely low IQ score faces many obstacles and struggles in his life…

    • 958 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Forrest Gump Movie Thesis

    • 1295 Words
    • 6 Pages

    In this final scene the real truth came out about Jenny that she was a no good low life scumbag that didn’t deserve to have someone like Forrest in her life. The amazing thing is that Forrest didn’t even care that Jenny never truly loved him; she would always have a special place in his heart. He didn’t even care that she kept the child a secret from him, he was just happy to know that he had a son. This teaches a life lesson, that you can’t be sad about the hand that the life gives you but rather look at it and be…

    • 1295 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    However, for Jenny’s case, she is seeking a figurative and more complex advancement of her life. She wants a revelation due to how she is tired of living a life of normality. She is actually happy that a blizzard has hit their place rather than Neil because she feels something different from the normal for once. She states “Yes, we have no radio and a beautiful blizzard and a house and woods and a mountain that are all ours” (2018). Jenny represents a heroic archetype due to how she is unique from her desires compared to Neil and other people. She describes to Neil that she wants her life to be like a murder mystery due to how “in a murder mystery, everything is significant. The people in murder mysteries are living in a significant world. A world where everything is there for a reason. Even before the murder’s happened, you know that one is going to happen and you know that everything is a clue. And you know that everybody has a secret of some kind” (2018). She wants her life to be like a murder mystery because each person has significance and everything is significant and there for a…

    • 502 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays

Related Topics