Groundhog Day Phil Rnor Character Traits

When watching the movie Groundhog Day you notice the main character Phil Conner is going through life day by day without looking forward to anything, this is part of his character. He is a Pittsburgh TV weather man who has been appointed to cover the annual event of Groundhog Day in Penxsutawney, Pennsylvania. With this event Phil is unhappy because he is an arrogant man that thinks everyone is beneath him, so why should he cover this event. He feel that he shouldn’t be the one reporting about a dumb event which is Groundhog Day. With that you notice that Phil Conner is maladaptive middle age man with a narcissistic attitude, due to this he cannot have a “normal” relationship with others. He doesn’t know how to develop a relationship with someone without making them feel less than him. He’s hard to deal with and his personality does not help him become a better person. His coworkers don’t get along to well with him and he is hard to deal with. But when he finds

himself stuck on February 2nd reliving Groundhog Day over and over again his view on life and how he treats people changes.
When looking at Phil Conner you can see some similarities between his personality and Carl Rogers’ theory of the person.

Carl Rogers was a humanistic psychologists that saw people as growing with their experiences on past life events. The self-concept is what constructs our personality which are characteristics that we label ourselves with when referring to our own personal behavior. When looking at Phil Conner’s he thinks himself to be a man that’s too good for everyone around him. You can see that he doesn’t like wasting his time with people such as Ned Ryerson who he walks away from on his first day in Penxsytawney. After living a couple of days on Groundhog Day he starts to play with people and ends up sleeping with a girl and telling her that he loves her. He starts getting the benefits of reliving the same day over and over. Also there comes a point where he calls himself God, he believes that he is God because he is reliving the same day over and over and he knows all the people at the

safe.
With the actual experiences, the ideal self, or simply his reality you can see that Phil Conner is a narcissistic grumpy middle aged man who is not liked by anyone, but himself. He is someone that doesn’t appreciate or take into consideration that many people really cherish this event of Groundhog Day. You start to notice that Phil Conner starts to notice that reliving the same day over and over losses its amusement and starts to weigh down on him. His reality sets in and he tries to commit suicide twice to see if he could get rid of reliving the same day twice. He also starts to push the rules, for example he steals the groundhog to show that he doesn’t care because he knows that there will be no consequences for him.
With this you start to notice that there is incongruence with most of Phil’s relationships as Carl Rogers described. This is when you start to realize that Phil’s self-concept and his actual experiences do not match too well, with which he starts to change as his days become repetitions and he starts to realize that he needs to better himself. An example of this is in the movie the first couple of days that he lives Groundhog Day over and over again he disregards the elderly man in the corner street, thinking to himself that someone else will give him money. When he starts to realize that no one likes him, and that he always seems to bypass the older man. His actual self starts to come out as a more humbling man and he starts to try the elderly man. When he realizes that it is too late, that the man has died you can see remorse come in. Because Phil relives the same day over and over again he starts to realize that he needs to change his attitude and behavior.
When this change starts to happen Carl Rogers would say that Phil Conner is reaching The Fully Functioning Person. This is where your ideal self or realistic self and your self-concept become closer in relation you then get to the point of self-actualization. With being the fully functioning person there are several characteristics which you much fulfill and we can start to see that Phil fulfills these throughout the movie.
The first is to be open to experience, we can see this when he starts to build relationship with people. Before he repeated Groundhog Day he was one that kept to himself and couldn’t build relationships. However now you see him building a relationship with the sick elderly man, with Larry the Cameraman, and most importantly with Rita. He starts wanting to spend time with her and relives those moments over and over again to see if he can build a romantic relationship with her. Before Phil would have never been open to building a relationship with someone like Rita who aspired his job.
Next, you start to see the spontaneity, and creativeness when Phil starts to want to play an instrument as well as want to do ice sculpture. Before Phil did not want to spend time with things that he felt didn’t matter but now that he is becoming a more congruent person he starts to do spontaneous things and becomes more creative. You can also see that he starts to adjust to all the changes that go on is his life in a short amount of time taking them as positive spontaneous events rather than negative ones.
Also, you are able to see that Phil starts to trust himself and the feeling that are arising in regards to Rita. At the beginning of the movie you see Phil tell a young lady that he loves her just to have sex with her however with Rita he starts to spend time with her and realizes that he likes her. With this he starts to trust his feelings and build a relationship with her.
Clearly you can see that Carl Rogers’s theory of the person can relate to Phil Conner in the movie Groundhog Day. All the change that Phil Conner’s goes through lead him from being an incongruent man with no self-actualization to being congruent and finding himself. You can see that he starts to value himself enough to build relationships without letting his ego get in the way. He becomes more positive, is able to build relationships, and he finally becomes a fully functioning being.