Psych Term Paper

Freud said that anxiety is the price we pay for civilization. As members of a social group, we need to control our sexual and aggressive impulses and not act them out. Freud proposed that when the ego begins losing control of the id and superego, it protects itself through defense mechanisms. A few of these are readily notable in the character, Black Mage (BM), but what made this interesting was the reaction formation of BM act oppositely of what it should.

BM’s reaction formation apparently causes all his good thoughts to become evil, sick and twisted. Every time he goes to say something good, it comes out bad. However, it should be mentioned that BM is inherently evil, thus, the possible cause of this strange coincidence. The other notable defense mechanism of BM is regression. When his situation declines, he declines back to his childhood habits of stabbing others with his sword (though, the individuals never sustain serious injury). I would continue into his obsessiveness with continuous sexual innuendo directed at his friend, White Mage, but this requires research beyond what I was able to acquire. BM’s rationalization is heavily used, due to the nature of his actions.

Personality disorders are fairly common among today’s society. Many of the disorders have adverse effects on the person that has them and that individual’s environment. The wake left in the path of a raging mage with paranoid schizophrenia is a really interesting and rather entertaining subject.

Continuing to use Black Mage as our subject, his paranoid schizophrenia can be most easily associated with his discussions he has with the “lesser evil” and “greater evil” that appear to him as the cartoon angel and devil figures. Due to BM’s inherently evil nature, he has warped these beings into the rulers of all his action, religious to what they say and argue about. He can also sometimes be heard using various voices to argue with himself in a three-position debate. As entertaining as it may be, these often distract him from the task at hand. The voices send him into tangents, which usually consist of rage and destruction, making him have a desire to just destroy all life and all inanimate objects.

In addition to the voices and rage tangents, BM speaks of the delusional experiences of being ruler of hell, and how he overran Satan to do it. He “sees” the demons and monstrosities that are roaming the planet and supposedly has control of them. These too speak and tell him to do things like stabbing Fighter (another person) and to make the sexually focused statements to White Mage. These usually end with him being smacked around by White Mage’s hammer, another possible cause of some of BM’s problems.

Fighter, the character that BM consistently stabs, has a problem with arachnophobia. This causes Fighter to run screaming like a girl to BM (Fighter’s long time friend). This doesn’t result into anything more than chaos, as Fighter’s phobia is usually associated with BM’s illusions. BM begins speaking of huge spiders, larger than humans, quickly making Fighter either pass out, hyperventilate, or just break down and cry.

Fighter’s arachnophobia also seems to cause him physically manifested pain. He complains of how a welt “must” be a spider bite because we’re not near water. Sometimes he lets his arm hang limp or drags his leg and blames it on spider venom. He also exaggerates of how the spider came deliberately toward him, or how the spiders are making a conspiracy to try and eat him (Very entertaining by the way). Many of these crazed stories are only related in some major way to spiders, making me think it’s more the phobia and not schizophrenia. After the episodes of pain, he just returns to normal, and it’s as if nothing ever happened. There are probably all sorts of other disorders and memory problems associated with this. Fighter, all in all, is a complete psychological mess.