Adolescent Development in the Movie The Breakfast Club
The 1985 film The Breakfast Club, which was written and directed by John Hughes, presents an ideal opportunity to study and psychoanalyze adolescent development. The film portrays five different teenage stereotypes (the jock, nerd, criminal, prom queen, and social outcast) which are consigned to detention in the library on a weekend day (Tanen & Hughes, 1985). As the teenagers gradually get to know each other and interact amongst themselves, they reveal crucial causes and effects of some basic psychological principles related to the development of adolescents. They share a number of problems in common including an almost universal sense of alienation from their parents and from adults in general. As such, there are several psychological theories that apply to them, including, most eminently, Erickson's stages of development.
Erickson's stages of development are predicated by some basic facts of what is known as lifespan theory, which contends that individuals are constantly developing from the time they are conceived until they die. As such, Erickson denoted eight particular stages of development that one goes through, the first five of which pertain to teenagers. The fifth stage is that in which adolescents form their own identities, and is the final stage before transitioning to adulthood. It is interesting to observe how several of Erickson's stages of development pertain to the social outcast, whose character name is Allison. One...
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