Life is like a mountain. At certain points in a person’s life they can either be on top of the mountain, soaring high, or they can be in the valley of the mountain feeling lost and alone. People react differently in these situations. Some people learn to cope to the best of their abilities and go on leading as normal a life as possible. Some people become depressed which leads to self-destruction and blaming themselves for what has happened. Others try to rectify the situation; they come in and try to make things better, but all their good intentions just make the situation worse.
In Kramer vs Kramer, the members of the Kramer family find themselves in somewhat of a crisis when the mother, Joanna Kramer, decides to walk out on her family. The father’s, Ted Kramer, main role in the family has been that of a provider, but he is now immediately thrust into playing the role of both parents. Not having been such an adept father to begin with, Ted is lost in the beginning but manages to find a means to cope.
Ted’s young son, Billy, is at a loss without his mother. He doesn’t understand why she has abandoned him and his normal everyday routine is disturbed. Billy’s behavior starts to spiral out of control. After a dinner table showdown between father and son, it becomes apparent that young Billy blames himself for Joanna’s absence. He realizes that he has changed for the worse in his mother’s absence, and believes that it was his behavior that caused his mother to flee, and he is afraid his father will leave him as well.
After a while, things seem to have finally calmed down for Ted and his son, but in the calm of the storm that their lives have become, Joanna walks back into the picture, claiming to have learned from her mist...
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...st for Billy. Though her intentions to become a part of Billy’s life again may have been good initially, she now sees that there was no integrity in her earlier decisions. Having acknowledged her faults and seeing how good a job Ted has done raising their son, Joanna makes the one decision that will leave her with some small sense of integrity; she allows Ted to maintain custody of their son.
Joanna Kramer seems to be the poster child for Erik Erikson’s psychosocial theory. Throughout Kramer vs Kramer, Joanna seems to enter into almost every one of Erikson’s stages. While Ted and Billy both experience different stages within Erickson’s theory, it is Joanna who exemplifies it.
Works Cited
Jaffe, S. (Producer), & Benton, R. (Director) (1979). Kramer vs. kramer [DVD].
Santrock, J. Essentials of life-span development. (3rd ed., p. 17). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.
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