1. Psychoanalytic Perspective
1.1. Defense Mechanisms: Displacement
1.1.1. Displacement involves taking out our frustrations, feelings, and impulses on people or objects that are less threatening. John Bender displaced his aggression in a very common way. John Bender would express his anger in ways that led to negative consequences, by taking his anger out on someone who poses no threat to him. Like when Andrew (the athlete) and him got into a fight when Andrew told him to leave Claire (the princess) alone.
1.2. Structure of Personality: Ego
1.2.1. The ego is the component of personality that is responsible for dealing with reality. John Bender's way of dealing with reality is by creating this bully, criminal like ego. The reality of John's ego is that there are costs and benefits from his actions. John dresses in a long, baggy looking jeans with combat leather boots with a red patterned bandana around his ankle along with some shades and his long hair and jean button up under a plaid sweater-looking like a classic bad boy. That's one of the things that defines his ego, the way he dresses. Another asset to his ego is his attitude. He's always sarcastic and very straight forward and he's not afraid to share his opinion. "Dork, you are a parents' wet dream, okay.......look I can see you getting all bunged up with them making you wear these kind of clothes, but face it you're a neo-maxi-zone-bweeby. What would you be doing if you weren't out making yourself a better citizen?", he says to Brian (the brain).
1.3. Marcia's Identity: Diffusion
1.3.1. Identity diffusion has to do with adolescents who are unable to face the necessity of identity development end up avoiding exploring or making commitments by remaining in an amorphous state of identity diffusion, something which may produce social isolation. John Bender is the adolescent in this case because towards the end of the movie, he and Claire are sitting down and she's looking through pictures of a lot girls as he's looking through purse at her makeup. She asks him if all of those girls in the pictures were his girlfriends and says "some of them, some of them I just consider" and Claire says, "Consider them how" and John replies, "Whether or not I want to hang out with them". Then Claire asks him why he doesn't believe in just one guy and one girl, but then he gets defensive and asks her the same thing, avoiding the question, and she says, "Yeah, that's the way it should be". He claims he never throws anything away, meaning the women, but he's just afraid of commitment.
1.4. Adolescent Ego-centrism: Imaginary Audience
1.4.1. Using John Bender as an example for the imaginary audience theory he's an adolescent who anticipates the reactions of other people to himself in actual or impending social situations. He puts on this image in front of everyone just to get a reaction out of them, to impress them, or to make them think a certain way about him.
1.5. Baumrind's Parenting Styles: Authoritarian
1.5.1. An unsupportive and demanding living environment is what this tough kid, John Bender, gets his toughness from. The parenting he receives can be described as authoritarian because the relationship between Bender and his parents is controlling, power assertive; high in unidirectional communication. Bender even describes the way his parents are and at one point towards the end, he comments to Andrew "I think your old man and my old man should go bowling together" and he said that because both of their dads are strict in a way where they don't care what their child feels or thinks.
1.6. Social Psychology: Role
1.6.1. Everyone in life has a role that they "play", a character that defines them or multiple characters/personalities. John Bender has his own role(s), a set of expectations about a social position, defining how those in the position ought to behave. John Bender has a couple of different roles, in my opinion. He is the criminal-a tough, stoner bully who acts really bad ass just to impress people or show that he's tough. Another role of his, I believe, is kept secret from all because he can easily be hurt and these very different, very opposite sides of him are showed throughout the movie. At one point he's picking a fight with Andrew and the next point he's on the break of crying after Dick (teacher) left him in that room and threatening to "beat the living shit out of you". He even jolts his fist as if he's about to throw a punch and says, "That's what I thought" and Bender didn't even move which shows the mixed roles he plays.
1.7. Memory: Retrieval Process
1.7.1. This is simply the process of getting information out of memory storage. I noticed that John Bender seemed to remember a lot during his little acting scene of what goes on at home between him and his parents. He appears to be acting out an actual scene, something that actually happened, at home and recalls everything about his scar. He has a very good memory which would be looked at as a good thing, but not in this case. All the memories Bender has, I think he's be better off if he forgot everything because there were some pretty scaring memories.
1.8. Learning: Discrimination
1.8.1. John Bender is not a man of many respects and because of that, learns to have a discriminatory personality-unjustifiable negative behavior toward a group and its members. Even at the beginning, him and Andrew and Claire are having a conversation about clubs at the school and he mentions all club members being assholes which is discriminatory because he's saying that all club members are assholes. Then Claire says, "Well you wouldn't, you don't even know any of us." which is true.