Forrest Gump: Erickson's Psychosocial Perspective

INTRO (BACKGROUND)
The movie Forrest Gump, based on Winston Groom’s novel, is set during the 1950s in Greenbow, Alabama. Historical events serve as backdrops for the story of a man who has no other desire than to be positive and live the best life he can. We first meet Forrest when he is sitting alone at a bus stop when another woman comes and sits down next to him. Without any hesitation, Forrest begins to tell her his story, one that will undoubtedly give us insight into to what shaped his personality. Here he says an iconic line that demonstrates that he is ready for anything. He explains that “[his] momma always said: ‘life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.” In this paper, I aim to use Erickson’s eight stages of development, Bowlby’s adult

To briefly outline, as noted in class, the theory is compromised of theories derived form psychoanalytic theory and is primarily considered with the roles that social factors play in our development. He uses eight stages: infancy, early childhood, preschool, school age, adolescence, young adulthood, adulthood, and old age. Each of these stages in development coincides with a crisis that the individual must resolve in order to move onto the next stage. In each of these stages, the individual also has something referred to as ego strength, which is the ego’s ability to successfully attend to the demands of the id, super ego and external reality (Assanand, 2014b). Since the story begins when Forrest is of school age, we cannot use Erikson’s previous three stages of development, being: infancy, early childhood and preschool age. We can, however, assume that Forrest was able to successfully pass through the stages and develop despite the psychosocial crisis that emerged in each. As there is no visual evidence in the film, we can only speculate about the previous stages. We therefore, will begin with the next stage: school