Simon Birch Case

How a person represents themself to people is how they want to be "seen", but the way that they may act by themselves in privacy could be someone entirely different. How people want to be seen is called their presenting self (Adler and Proctor 64). The perceived self would be a person's private self that they do not reveal to others (64). In the movie Simon Birch Joe, Simon's best friend, shows Simon that he is an outgoing kid that loves to have fun without a care in the world, never showing Simon how hurt and alone he feels on the inside from the unknown identity of his father. The outgoing kid that Joe shows would be his presenting self and the hurt and alone kid that he hides is his perceiving self. These concepts are factors to a term called identity management which is a communication strategy that people use to influence how others view them (62).

With Joe's father's identity being unknown his self-esteem suffered. Self-esteem is a concept dealing with how one evaluates personal self-worth (41), Joe felt that he was not worthy of having a father. Feeling as if he deserved to know the identity of his father his self-concept helped him to perceive the determination in his heart to find whom his father was. Self-concept is the relatively stable set of perceptions a person holds of themself (40). Ironically the identity of his father was right under his nose his interpretation of his father, Reverend Russel was a man dedicated to the church.

Joe also suffered from stereotyping, he was often perceived as a "bastard" child because his mother never revealed his father's identity to anyone. Joe's senses were on high alert when he heard people calling him a bastard, saw how people looked at him, and felt like an outsider, he attributed his senses to the lack of having a father. The relationship that was between Joe and Simon was supported by empathy for one another. Empathy is to recreate another person's perspective, to experience the world from the others point of view. (Adler and Proctor 118) Although Simon had a father, he related to Joe with the feeling of not really having a father there.

There is a scene where Simon questions the reverend about the priorities of the church. This scene accurately shows an example of emotive language and relative words. Emotive language describes something but actually announces the speaker's attitude toward it, when Simon spoke out in front of the church he signified emotive language (177). Relative words are words that gain their meaning by comparison, when Reverend Russel spits out that Simon is not a normal person he is hinting that the lack of Simon's size is enough