Good Will Hunting (1997)
Post-traumatic stress disorder, childhood trauma and developmental psychology
Summary
The
lm centers around a 20-year-old named Will Hunting. It begins when a math
professor at MIT discovers the gifted Will working as a janitor. He who attempts to solve
challenging problems at night, physically survived a childhood of severe abuse and became
entangled in addiction and quite a lot of problems regarding trust issues. The professor
comes to his aid with a corrective measure involving endless therapy sessions. At last it
lands on an old friend, Sean Maguire, to help the youngster heal from traumatic
childhood. We then epsy a transformational fellowship developed between the two where
they in uenced each other by crossing boundaries, along with sentiment, nostalgia and an
awful lot of laughter and tears.
Character analysis
Early experience
Will spent a parentless childhood su ering from torrents of abuse in foster homes. The
evidence appears from time to time throughout the lm from the fallout with his love
interest to the police records. The things done to Will is so bad that the word ‘torture’
sounds rather lightweight. And if only it wounded him physically. The emotional damage
from that is revealed in the very beginning of the lm where we see a cocky brat, as sti
as a stone, whose hyper defensive mode seems to never dial down. Not until Will outgrew
his boyhood of trying to be invisible and block anyone coming into his life, did he stop
nding comfort in ghts and substance addiction. Before that he’s afraid once he opens
his heart, he has granted others the chance to break it. Violence is di erent. Violence and
addiction allow him to take a break from reality at least for a moment. They create
delusional strength and coolness. In other words, only fools rush in relationships; real
men ght and do whatever they want. Little did he know it is a perfect recipe to get
nowhere in life. Wounded hearts had loved and had been loved. Over time they become
scarred but soulful as well. I truly believe in the slight di erence of openness between
being smart and being clever. Reading books gains us knowledge but to turn those into
wisdom, we might want to practice and exchange it with a lot of people as humbly as
possible. It seems that striving for a level of emotional intelligence guarantees a
meaningful life.
Will with his boys and Professor Lambeau
Will has some “lukewarm” relationships because he’s under no real challenge in mental or
emotional games. The characters exist to tell the opening of the story, his genius, which
we no longer see much once the plot develops. The fact that the professor who won a
Fields Medal has to surrender to a kid for his brilliance is the least convincing in the
whole movie. There’s even a scene where Lambeau tries to save the burnt solution by Will
and regrets knowing him. Redundant. Will simply solving math problems or explaining
science to friends su ciently proves that he is precocious. The friends take pride in Will,
as the character of Casey A ect says, “My boy’s wicked smart.”
Will with the girl
This relationship reveals how damaged Will is through his ugliest scars. Skylar is a
Harvard medical student whom he met in a bar and accidentally captured her attention
with his knowledge. Funny, pretty and loving, she’s a full package in his eyes except for
her background. Where Skylar came from reminds Will of where he came from. Her
wholeness and his emptiness, despite their crazy chemistry, soon become a hassle between
the two. Trying to put himself up there with her, he paints a picture of twelve brothers in
a loving family. At least this is the one time Will lets himself have an imaginary family.
The boy falls head over heels, so much so that he never wants to shatter her reality with
his complications. She’s nothing but the perfect dream. She’s his alter ego if he wasn’t an
orphan, if all of these things never happened to him. Perhaps the saddest thing is no
matter how much someone loves us and speaks of their love, we still don’t believe it.
That’s how broken Will is. He runs away to protect himself from failure and his girlfriend
from ruining her life. How was he supposed to handle something he never had before?
Without proper parenting or any guidance, the truest re ex must be to resist it. And who
would have known how many more hurted Will Hunting-s go hurting people out there?
The fact that some people might never feel loved throughout their entire life really has my
heart sinking.
Will and Sean
The relationship between Will and Sean goes beyond client and therapist. The dialogues
and especially monologues carry so much emotional weight. It takes someone like Sean
who can outthink him and tolerate the crude side to welcome his vulnerability. Will likes
being ruthless around his therapists. With Sean, he makes extra e ort on o ending his
gone wife then receives a slapback in return in their second encounter. For the rst time
he has someone hold his ego in check. The speech in the park may sound harsh, but a
notion of acceptance is what he didn’t know he needed.
“I can’t learn anything from you I can’t read in some fuckin’ book. Unless you wanna talk about
you, who you are. And I’m fascinated. I’m in. But you don’t wanna do that, do you, sport? You’re
terri ed of what you might say. Your move, chief.”
If Skylar is his alter ego, Sean gives him a glimpse at the future self. Will did not
necessarily chew Sean out, instead he’s disappointed at himself from a distance, being
burnt out and miserable with some wasted talent. Sean may also catch his past self who
was once an ignorant and inexperienced coward. It is an inner con ict or it isn’t? In such
a way they let each other in little by little while expressing tough love and patience. The
rst time I saw the scene where Sean comforts Will with “That’s not your fault” repeatedly,
I thought the kid had found his lost father gure. However, the parent-child situation is
often one sided whereas what they have is more transformational than that. The in uence
is mutual from day one. It seems to work miracles that in the end they are both able to
make changes that have been put o for too long. Personally, the di culty in expressing
care, the beauty of nostalgia, or even the lonely sight of Robin Williams give me a hard
time watching the movie. I could relate to it because I grew up on the least sugar coated
words and by no means did I regret any parts of it.
This too shall pass. So why not capture all “the good stu ” while we can?
Topic discussion
Development of Post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)
PTSD is the only mental health disorder to have explicit causes in the Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders published by the American Psychiatric Association.
It is survivors of extreme trauma experienced rst hand or through witnesses that are
prone to PTSD. A series of
ashbacks to those distressing memories can surround the
victim for seconds or up to days, triggering real-time response or persevering negative
emotions so as to block the passive recall. Trauma survivors can develop other symptoms
such as senses of detachment, grumpiness, jumpiness and outbursts without a speci c
reason, which used to be often misdiagnosed with personality disorders according to
Herman, J. L. (1992). Some survivors become PTSD patients if their symptoms stick
around for over a month.
Before we pinpoint the development of PTSD, rst we need to segregate three di erent
terms: fear, stress and trauma. Not all stress and anxiety result in fear but all fear
responses come from a surge of acute stress and anxiety. Beside the fear generated for us
as an adaptive threat re ex, some are embedded in our nervous system and emerge in a
maladaptive way. Such fear with wrong timing and persistence is called trauma.
PTSD symptoms can be formed and maintained with classical conditioning. It starts with
an unconditioned stimulus of a traumatic event that prompts an unconditioned response
of extreme fear. After that, exactly the same reactive mechanism is built as conditioned
responses, elicited by conditioned stimuli that are often characterized by a set of traumatic
reminders, a variety of which surface from one’s surroundings, mental, emotional and
interoceptive states or a combination of such cues. What is special is it only takes one
intense exposure for fear to root in the nervous system. In contrast to the one-trial
learning to employ fear, its erasure requires numerous alternative narratives. Another
model to explain the development and perpetuation of PTSD zoom in on two cognitive
processes: altered memory for the event and negative evaluation following such event.
Although trauma survivors recall incoherent memories, they are hyper vigilant by stimuli
associated with such vague, fragmented and inconsequent memories of the event. It is
possible as an inconsistent memory trumps a perfectly meaningful and contextual one.
Remember the mind cannot get over uncertainty while tempting to make instant guesses.
Guess where it gets the muse from? The root-in fear! This is where previous conditioning
and this model integrate. In the same direction, negative evaluation such as “Maybe I
deserve it” and the dysfunctional behavior to avoid uncomfortable events altogether and
overgeneralize, all reinforce PTSD symptoms.
The lm succeeds in telling the story of childhood abuse in the least horror way with very
few violent scenes. This helps protect the audience from eyewitness trauma incidentally
and make room for them to imagine and empathize. Complex PTSD ts perfectly in Will
Hunting’s condition given his trauma exposure stretches out many years, based on the
work of Herman, J. L. (1992). The study makes insightful points of relational di culties
in survivors of childhood abuse. PTSD and borderline personality disorder patients share
these di culties. They have an unhealthy relationship with companionship, overcautious
of others but also resistant from solitude. This isn’t a hard truth to Will because he tends
to enjoy his alone time on long commutes and in night shifts. However the rest of his
character aligns with the fear toward both domination and abandonment that are
responsible for “extremes of abject submissiveness and furious rebellion”. Will’s inaction
with his talent also resembles a deformation of identity and somewhat traumatic bonding.
A malevolent sense of the self as dark, tamed and guilty surfaces prominently during the
fallout with his girlfriend. Otherwise why can’t Will make changes to his life or at least
remove himself from the house of terror? The deal maker, however, with speci cally
complex PTSD and not the other is that survivors of a single brief trauma do not form
self-mutilation. And Will has a hard time rejecting street ghts as if prison was his home
sweet home. Society is known to not receive these chronically traumatized people very
well. It judges them harshly and exerts coercive control applying concepts of ordinary
development of personality and misdiagnosis. Without a helping hand from people like
Professor Lambeau, Will and other traumatized young people would have been drowned
in social stigma and struggled to move on in life.
A PTSD brain and what it needs
Trauma exposure, whether chronic or acute, is associated with permanent changes in the
brain areas implicated in the stress response. Bremner J. D. (2006) have found that PTSD
brains anticipate a decrease in hippocampal and anterior cingulate volumes and medial
prefrontal cingulate function as well. It translates into worse attention allocation,
emotional expression, mood regulation and long term memory. On top of that,
hyperactive amygdala function and enhanced baseline level of cortisol and noradrenaline
in subsequent stimuli. In other words, PTSD patients are more tense, prone to
overreaction to fear and have di culty in returning from a
ght-or- ight response.
Behavioral tools can be powerful to rewire and reverse PTSD. Intervention in the
development and maintenance of PTSD is considered to show improvement in recovery,
namely narrative therapy by detailed recounting or retelling those events to construct
coherent memories or by erasing fear and replacing it with a positive response to the
stimulus. Social connection (distant from the perpetrator) is helpful to loosen up the
trauma bonding e ect. Narrative therapy requires proper instruction hence limits its
accessibility. However, a self-guided approach can be quite useful such as daily practice of
physiologic sigh and/or cyclic hyperventilation to control cortisol level. Pharmacology can
also contribute to mitigating several PTSD symptoms. Ketamine, MDMA and other
prescription drugs with antidepressant e ects belong to this category.
Good Will Hunting does not provide a crystal clear picture of PTSD in terms of
controlling the symptoms that the main character experiences. Will’s former psychiatrists
seem to exercise no other than the narrative approach while Sean prefers combining it
with the social support factor. The point is, narrative therapy trumps other methods in
e ectiveness thus it deserves more screen time for the audience to contemplate practical
implications. The youngster does not receive any pharmacology assistance either
regarding the complex form of PTSD he deals with. I think this is due to the fact that the
movie is made without public education purpose in mind and if it happens to mention
any drug name, it violates the commercial law and incidentally promotes self prescription,
which is a dangerous thing for the general public to do. Moreover, the lm set false
expectations for the psychiatry therapy sessions according to Karl Deisseroth, a clinical
psychiatrist and scientist. A psychiatrist in real life should never expose himself to a
patient about his personal life the way Sean Maguire does in the movie. Remember none
of these patients are mentally stable in the
rst place; therefore, to reveal more
information than needed poses an incredible amount of risks to the professional’s privacy
and safety. The relationship between a psychiatrist and a client need not go that far to
treat PTSD. The movie might have sacri ced this accuracy point for the emotional factor
in a persuasive fellowship between the two characters, which makes more monetary sense
to the box o ce. The cathartic e ect throughout the arguments is perfectly rewarding to
the audience, making it worth revealing the vulnerable side of Sean as a psychiatrist.
Personal perspective
Good Will Hunting is a perfect depiction of young people struggling with their mental
health. My awareness of mental health and the will to seek more information about the
problem is raised like never before because of the movie. I realized myself having all the
behaviors of a major depression for months before while doing research for this report.
But to say the movie leaves a big impression on the particular PTSD, it fails to do so with
me. I just want to be reminiscent of the great Robin Williams when choosing the movie.
At one time, his improv was so good that Matt couldn’t help but squeal with laughter and
the frame shook as the cameraman was also dying of the joke. I don’t think I adore him
enough. Another thing I love about the lm is the wordy-playful choice of the main
character’s name. I didn’t know the character name until I watched the lm, so I thought
it was about nding good will in life.
The mental health issues to me were once a very American thing to me but now it has me
thinking about the situation in my own country. Almost 1 in 4 adults in the U.S. undergo
mental disorders in a given year and that is a high income country. I project the gure in
Vietnam is much higher given our low living standards and the under-development of
psychology. My cousin studied in this eld and now supports autistic children for a living.
The time when Vietnamese people feel comfortable talking openly about mental health
issues and treat them to the exact signi cance is still very distant. Most people cannot
a ord therapy of any kind thus they choose to ignore it altogether. Women would be
whiny or demanding and men would be weak if they ever speak up about their struggle.
It’s not a thing in our lives doesn’t mean it should never be.
As keen on Matt Damon as my white teacher is, I would suggest a Denzel Washington
lm to the list of choices called Fences(2016). The
lm deals with discrimination,
fatherlessness and external a air so genuinely and harshly at times. It is a Broadway play
adapted to the big screen. Another great movie is What about Bob (1991) starring Bill
Murray. As Good Will Hunting does with PTSD, it also tells the story of a
psychiatrist-client relationship in treating obsessive-compulsive disorder, panic disorder
and multiple phobias. These movies would add more choices to di erent preferences for
di erent movie fans in the Psychology class.
References
Herman, J. L. (1992). Complex PTSD: A syndrome in survivors of prolonged and
repeated trauma. Journal of Traumatic Stress, 5(3), 377–391.
https://doi.org/10.1002/jts.2490050305
Bremner J. D. (2006). Traumatic stress: e ects on the brain. Dialogues in clinical
neuroscience, 8(4), 445–461. https://doi.org/10.31887/DCNS.2006.8.4/jbremner
Sherin, J. E., & Nemero , C. B. (2011). Post-traumatic stress disorder: the
neurobiological impact of psychological trauma. Dialogues in clinical neuroscience, 13(3),
263–278. https://doi.org/10.31887/DCNS.2011.13.2/jsherin
Spielman R. M., et al. (2020). Psychology nd edition. OpenStax.
https://openstax.org/details/books/psychology-2e?Book%20details