Theory of Characters and Characterization

how perfect the families are. The sign of emotional problem that occurs as the result of a repressed experience is the repetition of self-destructive behaviour. 2. The repressed feelings are “buried in our unconscious through the use of defences ” Bressler, 1999:86 There are four common defences that come up from the repressed experiences. The first is denial. Denial is when people deny by believing that an emotionally painful situation does not exist or never occurred. The second, avoidance is when people stay away from anything that could lead them to the painful memory. The third, displacement is when people take out their negative feelings about something or someone so that they can feel relieved without even realizing the real cause. The last, projection is when people project their problems onto someone else in order to prove that they don’t have the problems. 3. Core issue that comes up from the powerful buried experiences If the experience buried in the unconscious is powerful enough, it will become a core issue core is sue is a fundamental part of people’s personalities that determines many of their feelings and a good deal of behaviour. Bressler also mentions that there are five core issues that generally occur in human ’s life. They are low self- esteem the unwarranted belief that we are less worthy than other human beings and, therefore, don’t deserve attention, love, or any other form of life’s rewards, insecurity unable to sustain a feeling of personal identity, fear of abandonment the unwarranted nagging belief that our friends and loved ones are going to desert us physical abandonment or don’t really care about us emotional abandonment, fear of intimacy unwarranted but unshakeable and overpowering feeling that emotional closeness will seriously damage or destroy us and that we must, therefore, protect ourselves by remaining at an emotional distance from others and oedipal fixation a dysfunctional bond with a parent of the opposite sex that we don’t outgrow and that doesn’t permit us to mature into adult relationships with others. There are two kinds of oedipal fixation. They are mother fixation and father fixation. In mother fixation, “people are attracted only to women who resemble the mother, but because of this the shadow of the incest taboo makes the expression of sexual feelings towards them difficult or impossible ” Barry, 2009:103, vice versa with father fixation. Because of that, people “degrade their love objects”Barry, 2009:103 in order to make their love objects available as sexual partners. 4. Core issues will result on certain “self-destructive behaviours and may show up in the recurrence of disturbing dreams ” Bressler, 1999:86 The manifestation of core issue is a certain destructive behaviour such as “choosing unhealthy friends or romantic partners, displaying inappropriate social behaviour for example, habitually dominating conversations or throwing temper tantrums in response to disagreements, engaging in unwarranted violent behaviour, engaging in substance abuse, and the like. The recurrence of a disturbing dream might also be a clue to the existence of an unconscious problem, as might a tendency to behave in defensive manner when certain topics come up in a conversation ” Bressler, 1999:83.