What About Bob

After watching the movie What about Bob, I chose to write about the Character of Dr Marvin, the psychiatrist who goes on a vacation with his family and finds Bob, one of his multi-phobic patients, following him everywhere because of being attached to him. Dr Marvin chooses to act negatively to what Bob is doing and shows three different ways or mechanisms to deal with his anger. These mechanisms are denial, projection and displacement.

As a result of being provoked and followed all the time by Bob, Dr Marvin feels angry and stressed, he shows some obvious mechanisms to cope with his internal anger. The first way that Dr Marvin shows is denial which is choosing not to recognize an emotion or a problem. Throughout the movie we get the sense that Dr Marvin envies Bob. He feels that Bob is taking all the credit for things that belong to him. For example, he feels envy because his family loves Bob for being sensitive and a good listener, while he is not, and he gets into a condition of denial because he refuses to admit that he may be jealous from his multi-phobic patient.

The second coping mechanism that Dr Marvin shows is projection, which is putting his faults onto someone else. Dr Marvin is very angry with Bob that he constantly projects his anger onto him. Being a psychiatrist, he should consider the fact that Bob is a patient who needs treatment, but instead he blames anything that goes wrong in his life on Bob. For example, not being very good in front of the cameras when he is in Good Morning America, and behaving the way he does with his wife and kids.

The third defense mechanism that we see with Dr Marvin is displacement, which is transferring emotions from the original source to another. Dr Marvin's anger gets uncontrollable and instead of being the one who helps people manage and control their emotions, his own emotions get out of control. We see Dr Marvin yelling all the time to Bob and to his family. He displaced his anger and