Shining Psychology and the Macabre
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Nestled amongst the majestic mountains of Colorado is a grand hotel where a happy family is to spend the winter in comfort and relaxation while caring for the hotels maintenance. The father is a good man of strong morals who is a hard worker and is very sociable. One snowy day at the hotel, the father hacks up his wife and two daughters with an axe and stacks them neatly in the lobby before blowing his brains out with a shotgun. This is the story mentioned by the hotel manager to the new maintenance man before he brings his wife and son up for the winter, and sets the mood for the Stephen King cult classic "The Shining." The movie, directed by Stanley Kubrick, is a great example of dysfunctional psychology. This paper will address the symptoms, diagnosis, and treatment of the least and most mentally fit individuals in "The Shining" and will discuss the theory behind the analysis.
In the movie, the tempestuous Jack Torrance (played by the infamous Jack Nicholson) decides to spend the five months isolated with his wife Wendy (Shelley Duvall) and son Danny (Danny Lloyd) so he can start writing a novel. Tension, psychosis, and murder are rampant throughout the movie, and by using the DSM IV guidelines, the disorders of each character can be broken down. The magnitude of psychological dysfunction among the characters is as follows: Winifred, being the least psychologically abnormal, suffers mainly from dependent personality and a brief psychotic disorder; Jack is violent and homicidal, suffering from a schizophrenoform disorder and acute stress, but his prognosis is far better than his son so he is in the middle; finally Danny, who suffers from undifferentiated schizophrenia with marked stressors, possibly dissociative identity disorder, and has the least promising prognosis of the three.
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