Good Will Hunting Case

"Good Will Hunting" is the story of a man named Will Hunting who was abused as a child by many of his foster families. He works as a janitor at MIT where he is discovered by a teacher working there who then sends him to see a therapist to try and sort out some of the problems of his past. In this paper I expect to explain how this movie is related to many of the things we are learning in Psych class. I will use examples from the movie and apply them to theories and people we have talked about. This will lead to a better understanding about some of the concepts and psychological theories we have learned and how they can be applied to real life situations.

Alfred Adler was a psychotherapist and medical doctor that found the school of individual psychology. He believed that social tension was crucial to personality formation, proposed "inferiority complex", and rejected Frued's belief that women have penis envy. In "Good Will Hunting", Will hardly ever lets people get close to him and he also has random outbursts of anger. Inferiority complex is a feeling of intense insecurity, inferiority or of not measuring up to expectations. Will does have an inferiority complex because he only has three very close friends and draws away whenever anyone gets close to him. For example, when he starts to fall in love with Skylar he then pushes her away and gets very angry when she asks him to go to California with her.

Erik Erikson was a psychologist and psychoanalyst mostly known for his theory on the psychosocial development of human beings. Erikson believed that a human goes through many predictable developmental stages and crises that allow the person to move on to the next stage.