Johnson 1 Evan Johnson Mr.

Johnson Psychology 17 March 2011 A Beautiful Mind A Beautiful Mind is the story of John Nash, a profound mathematician, from graduate school until his acceptance of the Nobel Prize in 1994. The movie itself focuses on his psychological disorder prominently as it had affected him substantially in real life. John Nash suffered greatly from Paranoid Schizophrenia. This mental condition denotes the blurring of reality and imagination to the point where imaginary people begin to be quite real to the victim. The paranoid addition to this give the victim of the condition to believe that he is being watched and spied on constantly, leading to immense amounts of stress. After watching the movie, Erikson's stages of psychosocial development and Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs seem to correlate most effectively. Erikson's stages of psychosocial development are characterized basically by certain time frames where events determine the direction in which your personality grows. For example, one stage is Industry vs. Inferiority. If a child is never given any sort of positive recognition for their work, they may gain a feeling of inferiority for the majority of their lives. These stages are as follows: trust vs. mistrust; autonomy vs. shame/doubt; initiative vs. guilt; industry vs. inferiority, identity vs. confusion; intimacy vs. isolation; generativity vs. stagnation; and integrity vs. despair. As for Maslow's hierarchy of needs, it states that one must meet the demands of certain psychological needs in order to move to a higher and more difficult level to conquer. One category is esteem. Esteem is categorized by one wishing to gain approval and to achieve. The hierarchy consists of a base of physiological needs progressing through safety needs, belongingness and love, esteem, need to understand, aesthetics, self-actualization and transcendence in that order.

Johnson 2 Four stages of Erikson's stages of psychosocial development are expressed definitively in the movie. Intimacy vs. isolation is the clear stage exhibited while he is attending Princeton. Two quotes jump out as portraying his direction towards isolation. I'm here to work, seems to express his idea that he does not have much time for social pleasure. Memorize weak assumptions of lesser mortals, expresses his detachment from society and also corresponds to him choosing industry over inferiority at a past stage. As he grows older he hits the stage of generativity vs. stagnation in which he ultimately sides with stagnation mostly due to his mental state. His hospitalization, medication, and belief in his job progress when there was no job give way to thinking that nothing really was accomplished during his middle adulthood other than realizing that he did have an issue and that his previous reality was shattered. The medication in particular was harmful because it blurred his mind from clear thought and processing, which is what gave his life purpose to him. Integrity vs. despair eventually appears in his life and brings a relatively happy ending in the movie. By the time Nash has reached old age, he is quite successful at keeping the hallucinations at bay and has become happy teaching at Princeton University. He receives the Nobel Prize for Mathematics and, in the movie, is happily together with his wife for years already. Maslow's hierarchy of needs is essential to grasping the concept of Nash's condition altogether. Charles, Marcee, and Mr. Parcher are Nash's main hallucinations which are with him for most of his life. These hallucinations can be attributed to needs that needed to be met according to Maslow's hierarchy. Charles was his apparent materialization that was needed to fulfill Nash's needs for belongingness. As Nash began his graduate life at Princeton University, life was much too stressful for him. To adapt, his mind created Charles, the quirky and loose character which gave Nash the relief which he needed. Marcee was for same use as Charles but later on in life when Charles finally could not handle the stress on his own. Mr. Parcher, on the other hand, was created to deal with Nash's esteem needs. Parcher gave him the high priority job needed to prove self-worth to himself. Even though the

Johnson 3 job and Parcher himself were not real, they were essential to Nash gaining a new level. These esteem needs were also first assuaged by Nash's amazing paper on economic game theory which eventually gained him his Nobel Prize. This initial recognition from the faculty was what gave him the extre few years before Parcher came to be in Nash's mind. In the end, A Beautiful Mind based on psychology. It focused on one great man's issues and gave a truly dramatic recollection of his life. The movie held many psychological aspects as any part of life does but it did portray Erikson's and Maslow's theories very thoroughly. The movie is an amazing one, especially if you can comprehend what is going on inside the mind of John Nash.