Beth, the mother character (played by Mary Tyler Moore) in the movie Ordinary People, is in Erikson's stage of intimacy versus isolation. In this stage, which characterizes the psychological and social tasks that people roughly from ages 18-40 face, people engage with the task of forming relationships in which they feel connected and loving towards others. If they struggle with forming committed, close, and loving relationships, they feel a sense of aloneness and isolation.
Beth cannot really form close bonds with her family, particularly with her son Conrad, following the death of her older son. She cares more for appearances and for restoring the outward semblance of functionality in her family than she cares about connecting with her son and the pain and guilt he feels over the death of his older brother. She seems to relate to people only in a symbolic sense—for example, she believes because they are a family, they should act a certain way—and she does not achieve a sense of intimacy with her husband or son. Instead, she decides to leave the family in the end because she cannot achieve true connection with them. At the end of the movie, she disengages from intimacy and chooses isolation instead.
Monday, August 5, 2019
What are Erickson's psycho-social stages of development for Beth, the mother, in the movie Ordinary People?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Summarize the major research findings of "Toward an experimental ecology of human development."
Based on findings of prior research, the author, Bronfenbrenner proposes that methods for natural observation research have been applied in ...
-
One way to support this thesis is to explain how these great men changed the world. Indeed, Alexander the Great (356–323 BC) was the quintes...
-
Polysyndeton refers to using several conjunctions in a row to achieve a dramatic effect. That can be seen in this sentence about the child: ...
-
Both boys are very charismatic and use their charisma to persuade others to follow them. The key difference of course is that Ralph uses his...
-
At the most basic level, thunderstorms and blizzards are specific weather phenomena that occur most frequently within particular seasonal cl...
-
Equation of a tangent line to the graph of function f at point (x_0,y_0) is given by y=y_0+f'(x_0)(x-x_0). The first step to finding eq...
-
Population policy is any kind of government policy that is designed to somehow regulate or control the rate of population growth. It include...
-
Gulliver cooperates with the Lilliputians because he is so interested in them. He could, obviously, squash them underfoot, but he seems to b...
No comments:
Post a Comment