Jackie And Her Twin Brother Marty example essay topic

Jackie-O is the daughter of a wealthy Washington D.C. couple, the Pascals. She has a younger brother Anthony, and a twin brother Marty. Jackie and the other children were given all they desired materially growing up, but were neglected emotionally, which lead to feelings of inferiority according to Adler. Mr. Pascal was a workaholic and the mother had numerous affairs that eventually led to the couple splitting up. Jackie and her twin brother Marty formed a bond between them as adolescents that the rest of the family did not share. The twins would spend the days playing with a video camera, giving tours of the family mansion, pretending it was the White House and that Jackie was the First Lady.

During their early teenage years, Jackie and Marty attended an Ides of March party. Jackie went as the former first lady, wearing a pink Chanel suit with fake blood and brains on the fabric as a twisted joke. The party was a traumatic experience for Jackie-O because the other party goers were disgusted at her idea of humor and shunned her. Marty was the only one to comfort and befriend her, and his gesture sparks a sexual relationship with his sister. The twins indulge their obsession with each other and the Kennedy family, even going so far as to dress up and stage re-creations of JFK's final moments. Jackie had always been possessive of Marty and hurt others in order to keep sole possession of his attention.

Marty once kept a lizard as a pet growing up, but Jackie flushed it down the toilet in jealousy. The rest of the family turned a blind eye to the level of the twins' relationship, which ended when Marty left for New York to attend college. Marty arrived home on Thanksgiving a year later with a fianc " ee, and Jackie does literally everything in her power to destroy their relationship and get Marty back. Adler saw personality as something established quite early in life.

He believed the prototype of your lifestyle tends to be fixed approximately at five years old. New experiences, rather than change that prototype, tend to be interpreted in terms of the prototype. Jackie seems to be fixed in the prototype that her and Marty belong together forever and all of her actions move toward that goal. Alfred Adler postulates a single "drive" or motivating force behind all human behavior and experience. He called that motivating force the "strive for perfection".

It is the desire we all have to fulfill out potentials, to come closer and closer to our ideal. Jackie-O strives to be like the Kennedy's and to have sole possession of her brother, Marty. To guide their behavior, people create fictional final goals that represent not reality but what is possible. Jackie's fictional finalism obviously has a goal of her and Marty being able to continue their relationship interrupted and unashamed.

Growing up in rich family with servants, Jackie was pampered quite a bit as young girl. Adler says that pampered children do not learn how to do things for themselves, which make them feel that they are inferior to others. Pampering also teaches a child that the way to deal with others is by giving commands, which can lead to feelings of hatred from society. According to Adler, neurosis is a characterized by an insufficient social interest and he defined three different types based on the amount of energy involved. Jackie is the ruling type of personality. Ruling types are known to be aggressive from childhood on and show a tendency to be dominant over others.

Ruling types strive for personal power and will hurt others to get what they want. Ruling types will also hurt others by hurting themselves. Jackie shows many signs of not having any social interest or empathy for her family and society. If she is not arguing with her family for something she wants, she is flattering and manipulating in order to get what she wants. When Marty shows up to Thanksgiving dinner with a fianc " ee it visibly upsets her, but she soon finds a way to trick her younger brother into successfully seducing the girl. A lack of social concern like this is Adler's basis of mental ill health and thus leads to neurotic behavior neurotic behavior like Jackie's.

According to Adler, Jackie's lack of empathy tells us that she is too self-interested which is caused by feelings of inferiority and low self-esteem. Jackie's feelings of inferiority may stem from the Ides of March party where she was shunned for her bad taste. Feelings of inferiority in one area of life lead to compensation in others, music and language for example. Her feelings of inferiority seem to have developed a superiority complex, which involves covering up her own shortcomings by pretending to be superior. This is a safeguarding strategy that is common in individuals with feelings of inferiority to compensate for their true, inferior feelings. In what begins as a casual conversation, Jackie brags to her brother's fianc " ee that she can speak French, making her feel superior, then verbally attacks Marty's fianc " ee about growing up poor to make the girl feel inferior.

Adler must be credited as the first theorist to include not only a child's mother and father as early influences on the child, but the child's brothers and sisters as well. Birth-order is another of Adler's theories, and Jackie fits into some of his firstborn child expectations. The first child begins life as an only child, with all the attention to him or herself. Adler believed that firstborn children feel "dethroned" with the arrival of the second kid, and become disobedient and rebellious. In Jackie's case, she was never an only child since she was born with a twin brother, but Adler's ideas still apply in her case since her and Marty were so close. The twins sexual relationship and obsession with the Kennedy's begins soon after their younger brother is born.

Rogers only considers two personality types in his theory: functioning and non-functioning self-actualizing tendency. A non-functional person is considered to be maladjusted and Rogers discussed conditions that cause the maladjustment. A maladjusted person has received only conditional positive regard, which occurs when significant people in our lives put conditions on what we must do to gain their love and support. Positive regard is strongly needed and attempts are made to meet the conditions on which it comes. A full functioning person is someone who is congruent between their ideal and actual selves and is thus able to live up to his or her full potential as a human being. Under Rogers' guidelines, Jackie would be classified a person with a non-functioning self-actualization tendency.

Maladjusted individuals are defensive and they content to maintain rather than improve their life. Jackie is extremely defensive even when asked everyday questions by her family, and becomes furious whenever accused of wrongdoing. She merely maintains her life, because her and her family is content as long as she takes her medicine and avoids psychotic outbreaks. Her brother Anthony tells Marty that Jackie's day is split between reading assassination books and watching soap operas and his time is spent making sure his sister takes her medicine.

No plans for her to improve her mental health and move out of the family home is every mentioned, and her younger brother Anthony even confesses to dropping out of Stanford to "take care of her". Mrs. Pascal seems to have given up on helping her daughter's mental condition, and tells her son Marty "Jackie is sick, I cannot make her get any better". A prominent and wealthy family, the Pascals seem to have placed importance on scholastic achievements and other intellectual pursuits. Marty and Anthony both attend very prestigious universities; all three children are fluent in another language and all three are also extremely talented at the piano. Most likely, Jackie was given only love and attention as long as she excelled at school and music, resulting in a pattern of conditional positive regard. Ironically, her parents' attempts to make her a well-rounded person by stressing school, language, and musical ability have actually hurt her by making her try to live up to impossible standards in order to receive positive regard.

Another symptom of a non-functioning self-actualizing tendency is incongruence. Incongruence is the gap between a person's ideal and actual selves, and is the equivalence of neurosis according to Rogers. Incongruence is the result of receiving conditional positive regard, which occurs when significant. When approaching a situation where incongruence will be recognized, the individual feels anxiety and will likely use one of Roger's recognized defense mechanisms: denial or perception of reality. Every time the individual uses a defense, he or she increases their incongruence, which eventually leads to more anxiety and defenses. Rogers explains psychosis as an occurrence when the individual's defenses are overwhelmed and sense of self is destroyed, causing episodes of bizarre behavior and disorientation.

Jackie displays symptoms of her incongruence through her use of defenses. Upon hearing of her brother's engagement, she impulsively lets out a shriek that she quickly changes to a joyful laugh and then runs out of the room. This is an example of her defense reaction of denial to the anxiety of a situation produced by her incongruence. Rogers considered denial to be the avoidance of the situation and repression of the memory that causes anxiety.

Jackie's ideal self wants her brother's affections all to herself, which is a much different perception than the reality of his engagement that she is confronted with. Later when left alone with her brother, Jackie seduces him as if he had never gotten engaged and her congruence is temporarily repaired. Perceptual distortion is a form of defense that reinterprets the situation to be less threatening. Jackie is bothered by society norms that frown upon sexual contact between siblings, so she explains her perception to him: that she and Marty are so much alike and emotionally connected due to them being twins that they belong together.

Rogers explains that every time an individual uses a defense, the distance between the real and ideal self increases along with incongruence. Increased incongruence leads to more situations that cause anxiety, and therefore more defenses. It becomes a vicious cycle that the person eventually is unable to get out of. This cycle is defenses and anxiety is part of Rogers's explanation of psychosis. Psychosis occurs when a person's defenses are overworked, and their perception of their self is destroyed. Behavior at this time is inconsistent and bizarre, saying things that made little sense and becoming emotional without being provoked.

Jackie's ill mental health and incongruence has caused episodes of psychotic behavior in the past. When Marty tried to go away for college in New York, Jackie shot him with a pistol in his stomach to prevent him from leaving. Without Marty even being in town, she still had an incident of psychosis in which she became hysterical over a bottle of seltzer water going flat. She attempted to boil the water because there was "no more bubbles" and then poured the boiling water back in the plastic bottle which proceeded to melt into her skin giving her third degree burns. When Marty attempts to leave with his fianc " ee the morning after thanksgiving, Jackie tricks him into reenacting JFK's assassination one more time. Marty agrees, because he thinks that the gun that they use only has blanks in it.

Jackie kills him and buries his body in the backyard to "keep them together". Adler and Rogers have each conceived complete, well-developed theories that are applicable to Jackie-O's behavior and personal history when attempting to explain her personality. Both theorists have a concept of the individual striving for personal improvement at the core of their ideas, although the importance and context of this striving differs. Rogers's entire personality theory is built upon the concept of an individual having or not having a functioning self-actualization tendency, and all behavior stems from this "force of life" that pushes us to improve ourselves. This "striving for perfection" as Adler calls it, is only half of his core personality concept, and Adler's perfection is in a social context, not an individual one like Rogers. Rogers's theory is often criticized as being selfish for focusing too much on the individual and not considering his or her environment.

For example, Adler explores the effect that birth order may have on an individual, while Rogers's silence on the subject leads one to think that he does not give it any importance at all. One particularly contrasting feature of the two theories is how they describe a healthy, fully functioning individual. Adler describes his healthy individual as responsible, capable, committed, effective, able and willing to adapt to social realities, and having a high level of social interest. Rogers's attributes of the fully-functioning person include openness to new experiences, existential mindset, trust in one's self, level of freedom, and creativity. Rogers's factors in determining mental health seem to be much more concerned with the self than an individual's contribution or participation in society, while Adler's healthy individual must be able to contribute to and function in the real world.

When attempting to analyze the personality of Jackie, I agree more with Carl Rogers's theory of personality due to it's more unified concept, application towards Jackie's behavior, and my own personal experiences that I see reflected in his theory. Rogers's views are simple in concept but are more connected and inspired compared to Adler's writings. If you can believe the core idea of self-actualization, the rest of his theory fits into place well. Rogers seems to have taken good ideas from other theorists and reworked them to fit his model effectively.

I believe that Rogers's theory best explains my characters behavior solely on the strength of his incongruence writings. Jackie's gap between her ideal and real self seems so obvious when observing her reactions to events in the movie. The anxiety that Rogers attributes to incongruent individuals is manifested exactly in the manner that it is described. When watching the character's actions again keeping the idea of defenses against anxiety attacks in my mind, I was able to spot many occasions that Jackie uses her defenses denial and perception distortion. The defenses were a concept that I began to see in my life unfortunately all too often after digesting Rogers's theory. Rogers made me analyze and understand my own behavior more effectively, and the same is true for Jackie's character.

I was also able to think of many examples of observing incongruence in other people, and was glad to have a name for their behavior.

Bibliography

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Personality theories: A comparative analysis (6th ed. ). Toronto: Brooks / Cole Publishing Co. 5. Ryck mann, R.M. (1993) Theories of personality (5th ed.