A Will To Change

A Will To Change

Good Will Hunting is a movie made by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck in the late 90's. It is a film about an abused orphan named Will Hunting who is incredibly intelligent, wise, cocky, and is in trouble with the law. The beginning of the movie opens up to Will working as a janitor at MIT. This is where he was discovered by a Fields Medal winning Professor, Gerald Lambeau, when he anonymously solves a formula on a blackboard placed in the school's corridor that took the professor two years to figure out. Professor Lambeau tries to get Will to turn his life around with the help of a therapist, Sean Maguire. With the help of the Sean, Will begins to realize there is more to himself that he actually realizes. Sean also helps him face his past so that he can move forward and embrace his future. It is a brilliant and inspiring film that includes many deep, hidden ideas of self concept, conflicts, intimacy, self disclosure, as well as many other interpersonal communication concepts.

Will is a person who doesn't care about social pressure. He is also indifferent about his own intelligence and uses it only to survive. This is what he perceives himself to be, but his perceived concept is hindered by the fact that he was an abused orphan. He believes that his rough life is his own fault. In the movie Sean asks: "Why is he hiding? Why is he a janitor? Why doesn't he trust anybody? Because the first thing that ever happened to him on God's green earth was that he was abandoned by the two people who were supposed to love him the most!" This broken childhood taught him to survive and to do that he must not show his feelings. That is why he is so defensive. He does not want to be disappointed. Will's self concept eventually changes when Sean tells him that "it [his abused childhood] is not his fault." This is the part of the movie where Sean convinces him of his self worth and what he means to his friends.

Due to Will's abused childhood he is a very defensive person. In the movie he expresses many different defense mechanisms and shows us different kinds of conflict styles including direct and passive aggression. One instance of a verbal direct aggression in which he criticizes and threatens the face of the person to which he is talking to is when his best friend Chucky tries to pick up some girls at a college bar and is called out by a college student. He saves his friends face by butting in and using his superior intellect to verbally attack the student about his education. He ends the verbal attack by saying "if we're not cool then we can go outside." This is when the college student backs off. He faces this conflict front on but there are many other conflicts that he is afraid to face square on. He uses sarcasm a lot when he goes to talk to the therapists. Sean asks Will, "what do you want to do?' and will replies that he "wants to be a Sheppard" is an example of sarcasm.

Passive aggression occurs when a communicator expresses hostility in an obscure or manipulative way. Psychologist George Bach uses the term "crazy makers" to describe this kind of behavior. Will expresses many of these crazy maker categories in the beginning of movie to the different therapists he sees. He utilizes the "trapper" when he sees the first therapist by dancing around making the therapist get into him and then calls him gay for wanting him when he was only getting into the grove of Will's dancing. He was also using the "joker" behavior in this scene. Another scene he uses the joker is

when he goes to see the second therapist. There he pretended to be hypnotized and when asked serious questions he plays along only for them to find out that he was not hypnotized and that he was making things up. He also uses many of these crazy maker behaviors on Sean, his final therapist. Will uses the "beltliner" on Sean when he finds out that Sean's wife is an off limit topic when he first meets him. Will saw a painting the Sean had drawn and started to criticize him and when he says "what did you do, marry the wrong women?" and Sean jumps to says"maybe you should watch your mouth."

While dating Skylar, the girl who he meets at a college bar, she wants to talk about him and asks him if he had any brothers or sisters. Instead of telling her the truth about himself he lies to her and tells her that he has 12 brothers. He tells her this to save face because he does not want her to feel sorry for him being abused. He also does this to guide the social interaction and to keep it going smoothly. Towards the end she asks him this same question again and instead of lying again he equivocates, telling her the unpleasant truth of