Good_Will_Hunting

OBSERVATIONAL STUDY OF “GOOD WILL HUNTING” 3251 WORDS Introduction In this essay I will observe the psychotherapeutic relationship between Will Hunting and Sean Maguire in the movie Good Will Hunting. I chose to observe Good Will Hunting as I identified with Will on a few aspects of his life. It was made in 1997 when I was an impressionable sixteen year old and I admired Sean for the way he treated Will and encouraged him to open up and face his issues. I think it was from watching the interaction between these two men that planted the thought that I would one day want to help people in that way. I will start by giving a brief overview of the movie to explain more about these characters and how the start of their relationship materialised. Due to the amount of detail in each of their sessions, I have chosen what I feel are the five most significant sessions, analysing the different TA theories that emerge in each one. I observed the injunctions Will carries with him from childhood, the shift in ego states between the two characters, the ulterior transactions and games they play in the sessions and how their scripts influenced their decisions and relationship. Before concluding I will draw upon aspects of my own process and how it felt for me to watch the character Will deal with his abandonment issues and fear of rejection. I will discuss my feelings on how I would work with a client that has experienced similar issues to what I have had and how this would influence me as a psychotherapist. Synopsis of Good Will Hunting The movie is based on the character Will Hunting who works as a janitor at MIT, a prestigious technical college. He grew up in South Boston, during a time of turmoil for the area and had a turbulent and violent childhood as an abandoned orphan. While he was at work at MIT he started solving formulas written on a blackboard outside Professor Lambeau’s maths class, which only a handful of people in the world could do. Eventually the Professor discovers that this mystery genius was the 1    evening janitor Will and he tries to track him down thinking it would be a great loss to the mathematical world if he let him get away. The next day Will gets in a violent fight and is locked up. The professor bails him out of jail on the terms that he will meet him once a week to study maths and the bail terms required him to meet with a therapist once a week as he was a repeat offender. Will agrees, but as the movie develops we see he is reluctant to start therapy and taunts and outwits five therapists who all end up refusing to work with him. Professor Lambeau gives it one last attempt and goes to see his old college friend Sean Maguire, a psychotherapist who is also from South Boston, and persuades him to see Will as a personal favour. Sean is intrigued as the professor describes Will as “a genius from Southie”. It is clear from Sean’s reaction there aren’t too many of those. The Painting It is evident in the first session Will Hunting does not want to be in therapy. When he enters the room Sean stands to greet him and Will just nods his head and sits down. Every time Sean asks a question, Will changes the subject so that he doesn’t have to answer. His past experiences have made it difficult for him to let anyone see past his tough exterior and as a result, he makes it difficult for anyone to get close to him. Being an orphan, Will has a ‘Don’t Exist’ injunction that becomes apparent when he is looking though the books on Sean’s shelves. He picks out a book by Howard Zinn called ‘A people’s history of the United States’ and quotes from the book “men and woman who were dirty and lazy, rough ignorant, lewd, and often criminal who thieved and wandered, had bastard children, and corrupted society with loathsome diseases”. By quoting Zinn, Will is giving credence to the fact that perhaps he did not deserve to be here because he was a bastard. Since Will learnt mostly though books and due to his upbringing had the tendency to believe he was worthless, he felt an affinity to Zinn’s work. ‘In his early years, the child carrying a Don’t Exist is likely to make compound decisions to defend against its fatal outcome. 2    These decisions will be in the form: It’s OK for me to go on existing as long as I don’t get close to people’ (Stewart/Joines, 1987, p135). Will and Sean have an interesting power play where Will notices a painting on the wall and asks about it. Sean says that he painted it and Will stands up and studies it closely and says - “it’s a real piece of shit” and looks at Sean for a reaction but he doesn’t get one. Although Will doesn’t paint himself, he reels off a whole lot of facts about the painting technique, which he has clearly memorised from an art book he has read. He scrutinizes the painting and likens the man on the boat to Sean and says that he looks lonely on his own in the storm, with waves crashing, and he looks terrified that he is not going to get out alive. He then says “maybe you do what you got to do to get out – you become a psychotherapist”. Sean closes it down by answering “yes that me, you got it in one. Now let me do my job”, but Will continues “maybe you married the wrong woman”. He can see by Sean’s reaction to this he has finally got one up on his therapist, and he smiles as he feels his game has worked. When he insinuates that maybe Sean’s wife has left him because she was sleeping with someone else, Sean jumps up and pins him to the wall and says “if you ever disrespect my wife again I will end you”. In this observation I can see that Will wanted to push the boundaries with his new therapist to see how far he could go, similarly to what he does with the law. He possibly does this to obtain a stroke – albeit a negative one. It is important to note Sean’s violent reaction to Will and his shift in ego state from Adult to Rebellious Child. Rebellious Child is part of the Adapted Child set of behaviours where we behave in uncensored childhood ways. ‘We are said to be in negative (or not-OK) Adapted Child when we replay childhood patterns of behaviour which are no longer appropriate to our grown-up situation’ (Stewart/Joines, 1987, p23). We get our first view that Sean is quite a complex man, and from growing up in “Southie” also has a 3    violent past. He is automatically acting out his script by dealing with emotional pain though violence and anger, possibly the only way he was taught as a child. The Park Bench When Will arrives at Sean’s office, Sean picks up his coat and says that they are going to the park for their session. When they are sitting on the bench in the park Sean tells Will that he stayed up half the night thinking about what Will said about his painting. “It occurred to me, you’re just a kid and you don’t have the faintest idea what you’re talking about”. When Sean says this he is looking ahead and avoiding eye contact with Will and has his hands buried in his pockets. I would suspect that Sean is not in his Adult ego state and that they are experiencing an ulterior transaction. ‘In an ulterior transaction, two messages are conveyed at the same time. One of these is an overt or social – level message. The other is a covert or psychological – level message. Most often, the social – level content is Adult to Adult. The psychological – level messages are either Parent – Child or Child – Parent’ (Stewart/Joines, 1987, p65). I can see from this transaction that Sean is speaking to Will from a Parent – Child ego state. Sean mentions that Will has never left Boston. He then goes on to say “if I asked you about art, you would probably be able to quote me from every art book ever written, but you can never tell me what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel. If I asked you about war, you would probably throw Shakespeare at me, but you will never know what it was like being in the Vietnam War. If I asked you about love, you may quote me a sonnet, but you have never looked at a woman and been truly vulnerable, stuck with her through cancer, sitting up with her at her hospital bed for months on end holding her hand. You don’t know about loss, as it only occurs when you love someone more than you love yourself. I doubt you have ever dared to love anybody that much”. Berne’s third rule of communication states: “the outcome of a 4    transaction is determined by the ulterior, psychological level communication rather than the social level’ (Lapworth/Sills, 2011, p44). This important transaction makes Will realise that his ideas are somewhat separate from reality and that he has been living life through other people’s words and thoughts by memorising books and theorems instead of experiencing his own world. Silent Will Will sits in silence through the whole session. There are a number of reasons that this could have been going on. Will is still showing a resistance to therapy and his silence may be an emotional response that makes him shut down so that he doesn’t feel forced to reveal himself. ‘The defensive use of silence demonstrated patient’s beliefs that if they are silent and withhold thoughts and feelings, they will not be hurt’ (van Servellen, 1997, p127). ‘While it would appear that the therapist is doing nothing in these moment of silence, in actuality much is going on’ (van Servellen, 1997, p126). Will could have also been silent as a way to gain power over the session and therefore control it. In the conversation Sean has with Professor Lambeau afterwards, he mentions this power struggle. “He is proving that he doesn’t have to talk to me if he doesn’t want to, and I can’t talk first”. The Date Will tells Sean that he went on a date the week before. When asked when they are going out again he says “I don’t know I haven’t called her”. When Sean asks why, he replies “Why' So I find out she’s not so smart, she’s boring. This girl is perfect right now, I don’t want to ruin that”. Sean challenges him that “maybe you are perfect right now and you don’t want to ruin that' Super philosophy Will, you can go through your whole life never having to know anybody”. Sean speaks to Will about his wife and her idiosyncrasies, and how that was what he loved most about her. He tells Will 5    that no two people are perfect, the thing that matters is if you are perfect for each other. It is revealed in the movie that Will grew up in foster homes and was physically abused by some of his foster parents. Will is continually in trouble with the law for anti-social behaviour. We know that a child needs strokes for survival. ‘Every child get scared at times that the supply of strokes may run out. To guard against this, they develop a repertoire of manipulations to keep the strokes coming’ (Stewart/Joines, 1997, p248). Games can be played as a way of getting these strokes. Will is a Kick Me player. With the law he does this by obtaining negative strokes – ‘As a child, I decided that since positive strokes seemed hard to come by, I had better set up reliable ways of getting kicks in order to survive’ (Stewart/Joines, 1997, p249). In this way Will was satisfying his stroke – hunger. In relationships he can play the Kick me game to avoid facing the question: ‘what would happen if I did ask others for straight positive strokes’ (Stewart/Joines, 1997, p249). This is apparent when he tells Sean he is not going to ask her out again, he is afraid of asking in case he is rejected. Sean’s Confrontation This was one of the last sessions Will and Sean had, and in my opinion, the most significant. By this stage they have gotten over some major psychological blocks and Sean is starting to make headway with Will. Sean has earned Will’s trust and has taught him to see beyond what books have to teach. Since their dispute in the first session, their alliance has grown from strength to strength. In this session Sean confronts Will about his future. He has received some substantial job offers and is not acting on any of them. When asked what he wants to do, Will says he is happy to take a job as a bricklayer or mechanic, he describes his job as a janitor as an honourable job. His reluctance to embrace these job opportunities seems to be 6    based on class pride and his script, and challenges his frame of reference. He feels he would be betraying his friends and old neighbourhood if he did something with his intelligence. As a child in foster care he could have received messages telling him he was not able to think. He discounts his gift, saying he didn’t ask for it and it doesn’t feel like a gift to him, it feels more like a burden. ‘Agreeing with this in his Child ego-state, he accepts the discount of his thinking ability. He feels inadequate and confused’ (Stewart/Joines, 1997, p190). Sean uses facilitative confrontation to challenge Will as he sees a discrepancy in what he is telling Sean and what he is doing. “From what I am hearing Will, you say you didn’t ask for your gift and that you would be perfectly fine working an honourable blue-collar job with your buddies. So you choose to be a janitor, but you work at the most prestigious technical college in the world and you sneak around at night and finish formulas that only a couple of people in the world can do, and then you lie about it. There’s not a lot of honour in that”. When he asks Will what he really wants to do Will replies jokingly that maybe he should be a shepherd, move to Nashville and tend to sheep. Sean gets angry that Will isn’t taking their session seriously and tells Will that he’s wasting his time and opens the door saying “playtime is up”. Will looks confused by Sean’s sudden anger and says “I thought we were friends'”. We can liken Will’s reaction to Sean’s switch in roles to a game Berne calls ‘Gee, You’re Wonderful Professor - in which the subject comes on as a poor little Victim and the therapist comes on as a wonderful, all-knowing Rescuer. This kind of game is absolutely fruitless and often ends up with the person not benefitting from the therapy and the therapist being angry and switching to frustrated Persecutor’ (Steiner, 1974, p84). Sean has been put on a pedestal up until now for offering Will acceptance and protection and has fallen into the Rescue game. It is important that Sean stands down from this one up position and adopts an I’m OK, 7    You’re OK position. . ‘In order to eliminate Rescues one has to believe that people are OK and capable’ (Steiner, 1974, p238). To conclude this session it is important to note that there is a scene earlier in the movie where Professor Lambeau and Sean have an argument about the time they were at college together. He challenges Sean about not pushing himself, as he had a gift and could have gone on to do great things, but he chose not to use it. From this scene, we learn that Sean may have been faced with the same issues that Will is now facing, especially since they had a similar upbringing. It is therefore questionable if Sean is really owning his thoughts and representing Will’s frame of reference instead of basing it on his own. My Process I mentioned in my introduction that Good Will Hunting made an impact on me at sixteen as I felt I could identify with him. At the time, I never really understood why I felt this, I just did. As I observed this movie as an adult I got those same feelings of identification, but this time it was very clear to me why. My parents got divorced when I was eight and I was passed around after that, from mother, to father, to father with step mother and then back to mother. All this moving around made me feel that no one wanted me and I developed a Don’t Exist injunction. I could completely relate to the story Will told about his fear of going on a second date, as on many occasions I have had to force myself to go further in a relationship and deal with the doubt that if I revealed too much of myself I would be rejected. I am still working on my abandonment issues and fear of rejection in my own therapy sessions, but I found it helpful to watch these sessions from another perspective. I can understand how Sean got caught up in the Rescue triangle with Will, he wanted to protect him and I feel l probably would have done the same. I am aware that I take the Rescuer role with most people in my life, it comes naturally to me and I find 8    it satisfying. However, the movie helped me consider the difference between rescuing and helping and how easy it is for one to feel we are doing the right thing, when in fact rescuing them at every hurdle is just enabling them to be powerless. By observing the sessions between Sean and Will I realised how important is as a psychotherapist to not get caught up in the Rescue Triangle as the power imbalance between the Rescuer and Victim prevents people being equals in the relationship and therefore goes against the TA theory that everyone has the capability to be OK. Conclusion I was astounded by how many TA theories emerged while I was observing Good Will Hunting. Sean and Will grew up in the same neighbourhood and had experienced violence and abuse. It is interesting to note how this helps them form a trusting and accepting bond. I think Sean took the role as Rescuer as he identified with Will but towards the end of the movie we see that the only way he finally gets through to Will is by stepping out of this one up position and trusting that Will is capable of making his own decisions. I feel that Will and Sean have non – winning scripts as they were both born with the gift of being genius, yet neither of them were willing to take the risks associated with it. Sean tried to teach Will to take a chance on intimacy and his career and Will challenged Sean to start dating again and give his life after his wife another chance, yet both will more than likely play out their scripts of being safe and remain as non – winners. 9    REFERENCES Lapworth P/Sills C (2011), An Introduction to Transactional Analysis: Helping People Change, Sage Steiner, C (1974), Scripts People Live, Grove Press Stewart I/Joines V (1987) TA Today, Lifespace Publishing van Servellen, G (1997), Communication Skills for the Health Care Professional: Concepts and Techniques, Aspen Publishers