Forrest Gump Personality Analysis: Overcoming Disabilities Through Psychodynamic Lens

Personality Analysis of the Character Forrest Gump Name Institutional Affiliation Course name Instructor’s name Assignment due date Personality Analysis of the Character Forrest Gump Psychodynamic theories describe the relationship between the personal and interpersonal relationships and their impact on personality. Reviewing psychodynamic theories demonstrates how personality develops in different stages of life and the impact this has on the individual. The film Forrest Gump produced in 1994 describes the life of Forrest Gump from his childhood to adult life. His character is interesting since he faced physical and learning disabilities that do not prevent him from achieving successes as an adult. With a low-than-average IQ of 75, Gump struggles with formal and informal learning and developing relationships with other people (Zemeckis, 1994). The film demonstrates the importance of key relationships including the love of his mother and best friend Jenny Curran. The analysis of film characters is an important way of testing and plying psychodynamic theories in real life situations (Hogan & Sherman, 2020). For this paper, the analysis will focus on Gump and use Erik Erikson’s Psychonomic theory and the humanistic theory to show how theorists would analyze the personality of the character. Erikson’s theory of development is based on the crises that people endure in different stages of life and their impact on development. The theorist divided life into eight stages of development and showed the impact that success in the crisis of each stage affects development. The theory shows that life could be divided into infancy, early childhood, pre-school, school, adolescence, young and middle adulthood, and maturity stages (Maree, 2022). As opposed to other theorists, Erikson viewed personality as the result of the interactions that an individual encounters throughout their life beyond childhood years. Consequently, he showed that the development of personality occurs past the adolescent years and that the early, middle, and late adulthood had major implications on personality. People’s achievements and failures in each stage are the result of their own personal development and the influence of their relationship