Will+Hunting

=  Will Hunting =

Biography
To the rest of the world **Will Hunting** is a lowly janitor at MIT. However, he also happens to be a prodigy, possessing a genius-level intelligence and a particular gift for mathematics as well as eidetic memory. A resident of a poor section of Irish-American South Boston, Mass., Will is an orphan and the product of an abusive, alcoholic foster father who used to burn him with cigarettes and beat him with a wrench. He bounced through the juvenile correction system and foster homes but lives alone and occupies a great deal of his free time reading voraciously through complex subjects. He also enjoys solving immensely complex mathematical equations that are posed as extra credit for MIT students. This is all done in secret, however, to hide his identity and his intellect. He uses the rest of his time not as productively; drinking and getting into trouble with his friends Chuckie, Morgan, and Billy. He is incredibly protective of his friends and is especially good at putting uppity, Harvard graduate students in their place when they try to outwit and insult his friends for not being as intelligent as they are. Will is also constantly in trouble with the law; he once chased down and beat a man named Carmine Scarpaglia who he claimed used to beat him up in kindergarten. During the brawl, Will hit a police officer that was responding to the scene and was subsequently put in jail. During his arraignment, in which he defended himself by citing legal precedents from the 1800's, the judge was astonished by his life-long criminal record of assaults and violent outbursts.

He didn't stay in jail long, however; he was bailed out by an MIT professor named Gerald Lambeau. Lambeau, a Field's Medalist in combinatory mathematics, was the one who posed the math problems that Will was able to solve. He originally thought Will was vandalizing the chalk board the problems were written on, but realized that the young janitor was a very brilliant man. He took Will under his wing in the hopes that he would be able to use his brilliance to make great new discoveries in science and math. However, he found Will stubborn, arrogant, and hot headed and determined that he could benefit from psychotherapy. He sent him to several therapists who all refused to treat him until he was finally accepted by Lambeau's friend Sean Maguire. Sean developed a strong, supportive relationship with Will and helped him realize his true potential.

Psychoanalytic Perspective
== A great deal of the therapy that Will undergoes is psychoanalytic and rightly so. He is a perfect example of what influence childhood experiences have on the development of an adult personality. Although his unconscious conflicts are not overtly psychosexual, they are certainly traumatic and confusing enough to shape a person's later self. Will describes his abuse at the hands of his foster father in great detail while in therapy with Sean. He claims that his foster father used to lay out a stick, a belt, and a wrench and allow Will to choose the implement he would be beaten with. This practice of having the victim choose their instrument of punishment could force them to subconsciously accept the notion that they are deserving of punishment and are thereby punishing themselves. Interestingly, Will would choose the wrench, the hardest and heaviest object, as a show of defiance towards the abuse he was receiving. Freudians would likely see this pseudo-masochistic behavior as an id/superego conflict; the id impulse would be to resist and fight back but superego constructs say that the older man is the authority figure that is to be respected. This conflict forced young Will to accept his punishment, but exercise some id impulse by voluntarily taking the hardest abuse. To cope with this serious internal turmoil Will's conscious became encased by Freudian defense mechanisms. He is stubborn and overly aggressive with little self control. He often picks fights and insults those who are trying to help him, especially the series of therapists he met before meeting Sean. However, this behavior only persists when dealing with men with whom he is not fully acquainted; he is sweet to and protective of women that he meets as well as of his close friends. For example, while visiting a Harvard bar Chuckie flirts with some female Harvard students. He is subsequently accosted by a male student named Clark who thinks it is funny to belittle Chuckie's intelligence in front of the women. Will steps in and outmatches Clark intellectually, afterwards also offering to "step outside and figure it out". These examples could be seen as Will trying to subconsciously assert dominance over other male figures who are attempting to display authority; a direct correlation to what he was unable to do to his foster father as a child. Will also uses displacement and projection as defense mechanisms. When his girlfriend, Schuylar, presses to know about his past and family, Will becomes enraged and violent. He blames Schuylar for asking too much of him and claims that she only wanted to be with him in the first place to be able to say that she "went slummin' too once". He makes her extremely upset and finally leaves her, all to protect himself from having to relive and re-tell the stories of his abuse. However, the defense mechanism that Will seems to employ most is repression. Although the memories of his abuse are clear and he is able to recall them, he is reluctant to speak of them and has also isolated himself from those memories emotionally. It is not until he has developed a very strong relationship with Sean that he is able to open up to and realize those feelings, urged on by Sean's repeated mantra of, "it's not your fault." Will not only struggles with the aftermath of his abuse; he is also tormented by his own genius. Nearly as prominent as his use of repression is his use of reaction formation. Will's superior intellect makes it difficult for him to hold what he would consider to be normal relationships. As a result he works as a janitor and does not display any desire to use his genius to his advantage. He desperately wants to be a "normal" guy, but inside is consumed by his boundless intelligence. Still, his will to form his personality according to working class constructs is persistent and strong. When Sean and Prof. Lambeau set him up with job interviews at prestigious institutions he often did not attend or insulted the people working there and the jobs they performed. He did everything in his power //not// to get hired, claiming that he would rather lay brick or be a shepherd. He holds a degree of self-loathing, quite probably rooted in the fact that he feels his intelligence is an unrequested burden that makes people think of him differently when all he wants to do is blend in to the crowd. On a more positive note, it could be argued that Will also presents a prime example of sublimation. During his years of abuse and neglect, the only solace he found was in learning new things; he told Sean that some of his best friends were Shakespeare, Frost, and Locke. If reading and learning were his escape from the realization of his abuse it could be considered a positive sublimation of a very negative series of events. ==

Cognitive Perspective
== Will's personality can also be analyzed quite effectively from the cognitive perspective. His prowess in mathematics forces him to think abstractly and envision the numbers as physical constructs. He is so successful at this that he solves proofs that Prof. Lambeau worked on for years in a matter of hours. Also, Will's quick thinking and ability to apply his broad swath of knowledge to his everyday life makes him a prime example of Kurt Lewin's theory of field independence. The theory implies that one can understand the observable environment when considering it out of context, a trait that Will demonstrates on numerous occasions. Will also conforms with Jean Piaget's "schema" theory. Will has developed many different cognitive and social structures to cope with different situations. As a child he developed a schema that told him to be wary and suspicious of people, as a result of his abuse. As such, he developed a separate structure that told him it was appropriate to use his intellect as well as his physical presence to intimidate those that he saw to be aggressive towards him or his friends. This is what causes him to lash out at Carmine Scarpaglia and was the fuel behind his intellectual thrashing of Clark at the bar. Based on Albert Bandura's concepts of observational learning and aggressive behavior, it is possible that Will created these personality constructs in reaction to his early child abuse. He witnessed the abuse first hand and saw that his foster father was not punished for it, thereby subconsciously retaining the knowledge that overly aggressive behavior is sometimes acceptable. This also demonstrates a personality that accepts Julian Rotter's "external locus of control." Although he is a strong willed person, he does not actually believe that he has any control over what happens to him. He is afraid of this fact, and as a result he hides behind his false bravado and sarcasm. The violent outbursts and sudden rage are out-of-control reactions that Will makes because he feels they justify his feelings that he can not control himself, even though it is obvious that he can. It's not until he meets Sean, who is observant enough to realize the behaviors and challenge them, that Will is able to look at himself objectively and redirect his focus towards productive pursuits. ==

Discussion
== Will Hunting is an especially interesting character to observe in terms of personality, particularly because a great deal of the film is devoted to his personality issues and subsequent psychotherapy. The character is deeply complex, emotionally distraught and confused, and above all completely insecure. The abuse he suffered as a child hardened him against the world and taught him not to let other people in, to always be suspicious of those who try to get too close to him. It also gives him a longing for an understanding father figure, one that he does not see in his would-be mentor Prof. Lambeau but does find in his therapist, Sean Maguire. Growing up in a rough, working class environment and associating only with relatively uneducated young men created a conflict within him; is it more important to flaunt and explore his natural gift of intellect or to fit in with a group of peers? Will decides that he can have both, but he must leave his scholarly pursuits to reading alone in his home and secretly solving math problems on chalk boards. He is actually called on this decision by Sean who asks him: "You could be a janitor anywhere. Why did you work at the most prestigious technical college in the whole fucking world? And why did you sneak around at night finishing other people's formulas that only one or two other people in the world could do, and then lie about it?" Still, his pervasive mistrust of others, save for a select few friends,is most likely the basis for the rest of his psychological and personality issues. When considering a new relationship or opportunity he automatically considers any possible negativity that can come of it in the future and becomes discouraged from trying. His omnipresent pessimism, sarcasm, and arrogance are a series of weak fronts that he erects in order to cover the fact that he is constantly struggling with his own identity. His true identity is only fully realized after Chuckie says that he laments the fact that he has to see Will every day, because it means he is not out using his potential. That message struck a chord with Will and allowed him to realize how much of a waste it would be to have his gifts and view them as burdens. ==