The Psychological Analysis Of Fatal Attraction, By Alex Forrest

This 1987 sexy, thriller film introduced a few characters to tell the story of a cheating husband and a crazy mistress. Fatal Attraction’s characters Dan Gallagher was the father of a six-year-old daughter, Ellen and was married to Beth Gallagher for nine years. The mistress, Alex Forrest played a sneaky, unstable, hot, single woman. The beginning of the movie portrays Alex to be calm and collective. Soon we find out how unstable and psychotic she really is. Dan gets involved with someone he cannot cut ties to and eventually has to tell his wife. The trait approach including the single trait approach and the essential trait approach, the Big Five model, along with the psychoanalytic approach tie in best when describing Alex’s behavior. …show more content…
The foundation noted in the book is comprised of “Psychic determinism, internal structure, psychic conflict, and mental energy” (Funder, 2016). Freud explains psychic determinism as everything happens for a reason. Alex wanted to be with Dan from the moment she saw him, all of her actions could be looked at as intentional to essentially get him away from his family to be with her. Though her behavior may be rash, she had a goal from the beginning of the movie to be with him. The internal structure is involved with parts of our mind. The id, ego, and superego make up our mind. The conscious being the superego, preconscious is the ego and unconscious is the the id. The psychic conflict consists of the id, ego, and superegos jobs. The ego and superego include our morality and reality thinking and realization. The id is thinking without rules, which is exactly what Alex did. If she saw roadblocks, she thought of ways to destroy them. She was not thinking of consequences for herself or for Dan and his family. The mental energy in psychoanalysis is, “Energy spent doing one thing such as pushing uncomfortable thoughts out of memory, is unavailable for other purposes, such as having new and creative ideas” (Funder, 2016). When Dan left Alex, she could have brought up old feelings of abandonment which drove her into a state of depression since it was happening again. This caused her to use her libido, or mental energy up and she …show more content…
Her problems can be rooted back to as early as eighteen months to three and a half years old. At the end of the movie, Alex has a knife to the side of her leg and she is repeatedly stabbing it into herself. She then takes these urges and tries to stab Beth. She shows that her urges cannot be controlled so that is why she acts on impulse. She does not have respect for others either and it is seen by her trying to get in the middle of a marriage. When she tells Dan she loves him and she is going to have his baby, she is baffled by his undesirable response. She believed her and Dan actually had a relationship and that they should be starting a family together. She tried to pull him away from his family. If she never fully completed the anal stage by learning how to control her urges and to be self-obedient, she could have had major problems moving onto the other stages in life. The environment around her also may contribute to her irrational behavior. She lives on her own in the city. When Dan leaves her, she sits in her room crying alone while flickering the lights on and off. Alex constantly calls him while he is working and even at home. She has no boundaries. Her abandonment issues could have also stemmed back from early childhood or just growing up in general with parents or friends. Alex’s unstable emotions display that her environment