Freaks And Geeks Psychological Analysis

Erikson’s Stages of Development was seen most widely in Freaks and Geeks. Whenever there is a mix of freshmen age children in with older adolescents, there is always that awkward stage. When I was in the 9th grade, the school system I was in was still utilizing the junior high school and we would not enter high school until the ninth grade. The year that Freaks and Geeks was to take place, I myself was in the 9th grade, so I sympathized with the show somewhat. Sam and Rory from Gilmore Girls had trust from their mothers, where on the other hand, Danny from geeks and Lane, from Gilmore, dealt with mistrust because of how their mothers were. Danny’s mother expected him to drop everything and get what she needed, even if that meant missing school, and Lane’s mother did not allow her to

do anything that was considered American.

When Sam and Lindsay’s parents left to go out of town and Lindsay decided have a keg party. Because of how their parents had raised them, this made Lane uneasy, not only because he knew it was wrong, but because it would be breaking the trust that their parents had with them. So Sam and his friends, Bill and Neal took it upon themselves to switch the keg out with a fake beer without sister’s knowledge. Erickson would call this Identity vs Role Confusion, but also could fall under Trust vs Mistrust. When Rory and her boyfriend Dean had sex while he is married, this is what Erickson would call Autonomy vs Shame for the way Loralei made Rory feel when she found out that her daughter had slept with a married man. The relationship that Lane Kim had with mother, who was a very traditional Korean mother, was very tricky, for her mother desired Lane to remain traditional, whereas Lane wished to spread her wings and explore new things. The stage that she is struggling with is the Identity vs Confusion stage, for Lane is wanting desperately to discover her identity as well as her independence from her mother, which is proving to be difficult. Just like Lane, Lindsay Weir is

struggling as well. There is the struggle with her parents, but her peers as well, for she has broken away from the “mathletes” who have been her friends for many years, and the group of adolescents that she has been competing with in math competitions, but now wants to explore another side of herself. Both of the adolescent girls are exploring the “what if”, or as Piaget would call it, Hypothetico-deductive reasoning (Cherry, 2016). At this point, the girls are thinking about what they can do about their situations, how they can look at different possibilities and/or solutions to what is happening around them. When Lindsay did begin to hang-out with a different crowd, her friend Millie thought that she was being impulsive (Siegel, 2013) and was at times questioning her decisions. Millie, her friend since childhood, would get very emotional (this emotion comes from the amygdala portion of the brain) about how she felt, but Lindsay was too focused on herself at times to care about that.