Tyrone And Sarah Goldfarb example essay topic

Psychology Paper The movie I chose to watch was Requiem for a Dream, directed by Darren Aronofsky. This film, set in present day New York city, is about four people who allow drugs to control and eventually destroy their lives. At first, all of the characters had control over what they were doing with their particular drug, but as this movie so disturbingly shows, when you are dealing with drugs, control is not something that you ever. The two characters who I will explore in this essay are Tyrone (played by Marlon Wayans) and Sarah Goldfarb (played by Ellen Bursty n). Tyrone is a black man in his mid-twenties. Throughout the movie he is looking for ways to get his life together, however he is trying to achieve this goal by selling heroin.

When Tyrone first starts dealing, he basically is doubling his money and everything is going great. However, when Tyrone's drug connection falls through, everything in his life goes down the tube, and at the end of the movie Tyrone is in prison in Florida. The psychological perspective that I am going to explore with this character is the Freudian theory of the Oedipus complex. By definition, through a psychoanalytic theory, a general term for the cluster of impulses and conflicts hypothesized to occur during the phallic phase, at around age five. In boys, a fantasized form of intense, possessive sexual love is directed at the mother, which is soon followed by hatred for and fear of the father.

In the movie, Tyrone has many flashbacks of him with his mother at a very young age. One scene that comes to mind when talking about the Oedipus complex is when Tyrone is about to have sex. Both the girl and Tyrone are completely naked, her on the bed, and him standing near the closet looking in a mirror. When he looks into the mirror, all he can see is himself in his mothers arms. Although he is about to have sex with the woman, the only thing that he can think about is a very detailed child experience with his mother. Another point that leads me to believe that Tyrone is suffering from the oedipus complex is his feelings toward his father.

Tyrone never really had a father, seeing as he took off when Tyrone was very young. He has had a strong hatred toward this man from a very early age, and became unhealthily attached to his mother. Sarah Goldfarb is a lonely widowed mother in her early sixties. At the beginning of the movie she receives a phone call from a television station, telling her that she has won some sort of contest and that she is going to be on television. Once she takes all this in she decides that she is a little overweight, and needs to be able to fit into a red dress that she wore to her sons graduation approximately ten years before. After trying several diets, she learns of a doctor who prescribes diet pills.

At first she takes them and feels great, but she doesn't know that what she is taking is a very high dosage of speed that makes her not want to eat. However, as the movie goes on, and she develops a tolerance for the pills she stops loosing weight, and starts popping these pills at a deadly pace. She soon looses grip of reality and eventually is hospitalized and given shock treatment to make her want to eat again. The psychologist with whom Mrs. Goldfarb can be identified is Abraham Maslow. When Mrs. Goldfarb learns that she is going to be on television, she tells all the other all women on her apartment building. Soon after this news, Mrs. Goldfarb becomes the topic of all conversations amongst the ladies.

Prior to this phone call, she was extremely lonely, and all she wanted was to be accepted and loved. However, like Maslow's hierarchy of needs theory shows, Mrs. Goldfarb mixes all of her priorities, and puts her popularity and beauty (her feelings of loosing weight) before necessary psychological and safety needs. Her desire for self-actualization made her blind to all other aspects of her life that were in much need of attention, and as a result of not taking care of herself, and constantly popping these diet pills, she was placed in the psychiatric ward of the hospital, never being able to go back to reality.