Breaking Away Analysis

While it is rare for a person to be singled out and used as an example of a personality disorder, it doesn’t mean that it hasn’t been hinted to. In the case of Breaking Away, Dave’s false Italian personality is not confirmed as an illustration of a personality disorder, but it can be perceived as a budding one. This is because while there is no concrete reason for the development of a personality disorder, there is a common factor within most cases. This factor is the state of the patient’s childhood, and more specifically their relationship with their family. More often than not, a new personality is shown to develop when the person has endured an extremely unstable childhood environment or suffered a form of abuse. It is debatable whether …show more content…
This is because the personality has been created to deal with the abuse and the high levels of stress in their environment. “In order to survive extreme stress, the person separates the thoughts, feelings and memories associated with traumatic experiences from their usual level of conscious awareness” (“Dissociative Identity Disorder”). The mind works to protect itself from the harmful, stressful events and uses this defensive tactic to hide the abuse from the person’s conscious thoughts. It is a method used to cope with what actually happens to them, and to fight off the potentially permanent damage it could do on their minds. An example of this would be in the main character of Pretty Girl-13. In this novel, the main character is unaware of three years’ worth of abuse that she underwent while held captive. With every different form of abuse that she faced, a new personality had risen to handle the situation for her and to keep her conscious from being exposed to the scarring cruelty of her reality. The multiple personalities that she soon came to possess during her captivity shielded her from the abuse and saved her mind from being traumatized by the events that took place. The development of her personality disorder allowed for her to leave the situation without any memory of the events, and for her mind to be unscathed by the turmoil is could’ve underwent. It worked like a vault in the ways it tucked away and locked up the memories until stimulated by therapy. Often times, though, “Some people with DID are reluctant to reconnect their separate identities because these different identities help them to cope” (“Dissociative Identity Disorder”). Unlike those who suffer from Dissociative Identity Disorder and refuse to reconnect the separate identities, the main protagonist in Pretty Girl-13 was able to