Openness In Good Will Hunting

Great Essays
Will Hunting- Impulsive, Fixated, & Unopen to Experience
Michelle McDevitt
Student at University of Michigan – Dearborn Abstract
Will Hunting is the main character from the movie Good Will Hunting (Armstrong, Gordon, Weinstein, Weinstein, & Van Sant, 1997). Will is incredibly intelligent, loyal to his friends and has the potential to do great things. He is also deeply flawed, the ones that I will be focusing on in this paper are from two humanistic perspectives and one behavioral perspective. Each flaw will be explained as part of the theory, then where they can be seen in the movie, and finally how or if it is resolved in the movie. The three theorists picked for this paper are Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow, and Walter Mischel.
Keywords: Good Will Hunting, Impulsiveness, Openness to Experience, Delay of Gratification, Fixation Will Hunting- Impulsive, Fixated & Unopen to Experience
Will Hunting has many qualities that are positive and negative. Throughout the movie he works on resolving many of the negative qualities that imped his growth as a person. Some of the issues he works on are becoming more open to experiences, a fixation in his love and belongingness needs, and developing a better sense of how to delay gratification. While he is working on all of these issues you can truly see in many of the scenes how they truly impact his life and how he grows as a person. (Armstrong, Gordon, Weinstein, Weinstein, & Van Sant, 1997).
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I will focus on the open to experience aspect of his person-centered theory. Openness to experience is when a person is able to deal with and clearly see the situations and aspects that happen in their lives, they can also handle vague situations as they come up (Cloninger,

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