Leonard Zelig Personality Disorder

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The abundance of personality disorders range in three cluster categories. There are Clusters A (odd/eccentric), B (dramatic/erratic), and C (anxious/fearful). Personality disorders are often filled with various problems. Problems include the inability to sustain close relationships, pervasive/inflexible inner experience, and an unstable positive sense of self. Today, I will focus on a subtype personality disorder from Cluster C. It parallels with Woody Allen’s 1983 feature-length motion picture, Zelig. Zelig stars Woody Allen and his then-wife Mia Farrow. It involves Leonard Zelig, who is capable of adopting traits of a person he is around. The film is presented in a mockumentary style, filled with archival news footage from the 1920s. As Leonard Zelig shifts from one person trait to another, psychologist Dr. Eudora Fletcher aims to “cure” Zelig of his affliction by interacting with him. She records her sessions with Leonard Zelig, in preserving early discovery of Zelig’s disorder. Leonard Zelig adopts many traits of various notable celebrities of yesteryear. These people include Calvin Coolidge, Babe Ruth, Charlie Chaplin, William Randolph Hearst, golfer Bobby Jones, a member of Pope Pius XI’s clergy, and a member of Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist party. …show more content…

Fletcher’s guidance. Originally thought to be of a physiological phenomenon, it turned out to be of a mental disorder Leonard Zelig developed over his childhood. In the film, it was described that he was bullied by anti-Semites. In addition to this, his parents never took young Leonard’s side and often locked him in a dark closet. This would explain Leonard’s tumultuous relationship with his living relatives. In their adult lives, his brother had a nervous breakdown and his sister became an alcoholic. Also, Leonard tells that he and his siblings were physically beaten by their mother and

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