Troperville
Editing Help
Tools
Toys
|
"Now I see that my life's hardships can all be traced back to a single event. Psychoanalysis is so easy when you're an anime character."
"Don't mock me my friend. It's a condition of mental divergence. I find myself on the planet Ogo, part of an intellectual elite, preparing to subjugate the barbarian hordes on Pluto. But even though this is a totally convincing reality for me in every way, nevertheless Ogo is actually a construct of my psyche. I am mentally divergent, in that I am escaping certain unnamed realities that plague my life here. When I stop going there, I will be well. ...Are you also divergent, friend?"
—L.J. Washington, Twelve Monkeys
The mind is a complicated, maze-like organ whose psychology and motivation may forever be beyond the full comprehension of human ken. Likewise mental illness and psychological trauma are difficult to understand, accept, and treat, leading to people and their families struggling for years as they try to unravel a problem's myriad facets.
Except in fiction, of course.
In fiction, psychological problems, even chemical and biological brain disorders, are treated the same as computer programs: you can get traumatized or cured with the click of a button, and all the symptoms and behaviours of that problem can likewise be clicked on and off as easily. This is because most mental illness in TV is portrayed with Single Issue Psychology. That is, all irregular or pathological behavior is caused by a single problem, phobia or trauma. People rarely ever have more than one such problem as well, the universe bandies out just enough Wangst to keep everybody going.
For example: The Stoic Shell Shocked Senior is the way he is because his buddy died in the war. Cure that, and he'll revert to his pre-war happy disposition. There's no parental abuse, PTSD, or guilt over killing, or decades of emotional isolation, it's just the death of his buddy keeping him down.
Needless to say, people with actual problems, phobias, or other mental disorders tend to get... upset... at this rather optimistic view at mental health. And even more upset when hack counselors are confused when they discover that Reality Is Unrealistic.
Compare: Freudian Excuse, when Single Issue Psychology is used to explain the Big Bad's actions. See also Bored With Insanity.
Examples:
Anime and Manga
- In Nodame Cantabile, Chiaki is unable to pursue his dream of becoming a world-class conductor because an incident in his childhood gave him a phobia of flying.
Comic Books
- For the first fifty or so issues of Justice Society of America, Obsidian was portrayed as a paranoid schizophrenic who was a threat to himself and others. This culminated in his attempt to destroy the world, which was thwarted by his father's The Power of Love speech. Despite schizophrenia being kind of a big deal, Obsidian hasn't been in any need of treatment since then, judging by subsequent apperances: apparently, working through his daddy issues was enough to entirely cure him.
- Subverted in Batman: The Killing Joke, where the Joker tries to prove that going through one bad experience can change someone into a maniac like him, in this case Commissioner Gordon by kidnapping him, abusing him, and crippling his daughter. It doesn't work.
- Similar thing happens in The Dark Knight, but the Joker does it to Harvey Dent this time, and this time it works, resulting in Two-Face.
- However, there were signs that Harvey was already on the slippery slope when the Joker pushed him off. Indeed, the guy would have killed at least one of The Joker's goons if Batman hadn't stopped him.
- Not exactly. While it is clear that he wasn't exactly the paragon of sanity, he wouldn't have killed that guy. At that point, the coin had two heads; Dent was just tricking the goon into thinking he was going to die.
- There's also Two Face in the comics rather than the movie, who originally only had his scarring to contribute to his insanity. Eventually he was given a severely screwed up mentality including issues due to Parental Abuse and problems with rage, which the scarring only pushed into pure insanity.
- Alan Moore actually deeply dislikes this trope, believing instead that characters should be complex enough that their personalities can't easily be encompassed by short blanket summaries. He mocked the concept in Writing for Comics: "I was just standing there, looking at my stamp album and the priceless collection that it had taken me years to build, when all of a sudden I realized that since I had foolishly pasted all of them directly into the album using an industrial-strength adhesive, they were completely worthless. I understood then that the universe was just a cruel joke upon mankind, and that life was pointless. I became completely cynical about human existence and saw the essential stupidity of all effort and human striving. At this point I decided to join the police force."
Fan Fiction
- Avoided in the Terinu AU fanfics Grace of God and Spin Recovery. The alternate universe version of Rufus did suffer from a major trauma, but he managed to inflict plenty of lesser ones upon himself in subsequent years, which he still has to attend therapy and take plenty of corrective drugs to deal with.
Film
Literature
- Used in a somewhat believable way in The Seven Percent Solution, where Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis of Sherlock Holmes traces his misogyny, his hatred of the innocent Professor Moriarty, and his constant search for justice, to one event: When Holmes witnessed his father kill his mother for sleeping with Professor Moriarty. Subverted slightly - Freud helped him through his cocaine addiction in another way entirely.
- Small correction: Moriarty was the lover only in the movie adaptation. In the novel, Holmes says the lover was killed too, and Moriarty's role is much more nebulous. Freud thinks he was the mere bearer of bad news, but Watson theorizes, due to past observations of Mycroft Holmes, that his role was deeper than that in some unknown way.
- Played straight and subverted in House Of Leaves, where one of the several narrators relates to the reader a period of several months where he lived with a kind doctor friend and his loving wife, who helped him get his life back together mostly by prescribing him one medication. The subversion comes at the end of the chapter, where the narrator tells you he made the whole thing up, and then laughs at you for believing such a ridiculous story.
- In The Color Purple, the high-spirited Sofia is a broken shell for some time after being released from prison. It just takes one opportunity to make a good joke at the dinner table to snap her out of it, and she's her old self again.
- Justified in the Everworld series, with Jalil's OCD; one of the few things he likes about Everworld that there, his OCD goes away. Partially subverted in that it literally is like an on-off switch; he continues to experience it in the "real world" as he alternates between the two. Brutally played with in a mental torture scene.
Live Action TV
- In Everybody Loves Raymond, before Ray was born, Mamma used to play the old "airplane" game when feeding Robert, invariably touching his chin before she put the spoon in his mouth. When Ray came along and became the eternal centre of attention, Robert was left to fend for himself, and subconsciously began touching his food to his chin the way Mom used to do. This lasted his entire life. I can't remember how it got resolved, but probably a Snap Back had him doing it again by episode's end.
- It didn't get resolved. They just found out why he does it, but he didn't stop (though the audience now had one more reason to like him). Him doing it then just fell into Running Gag status.
- The patient-of-the-week in any M*A*S*H episode that includes Dr. Sidney Freedman. And that Single Issue is almost always The War. There is at least one exception: the patient was Hawkeye, and the problem was rooted in a childhood experience in which his father pushed him off a boat. It was still a single issue, though.
- Somewhat justified in the cases of most 'victims of the week.' Sidney was mostly just charged with getting a diagnosis so they could get a handle on what to do with the kid in question. Usually the diagnosis was "Send him home, he needs a lot more therapy than we can give him in the middle of a war zone."
- Parodied in Third Rock From The Sun when it is discovered that Evil Dick is the way he is because of an unloving father. This is unearthed during a scene played as a mock tabloid talk show.
- Subverted and played straight in The Tenth Kingdom: Wolf's issues with food, love, and his animal urges are hilariously sent up in scenes with a New York Jewish psychiatrist, and after only one session (which he later describes to Virginia as "extensive therapy") he suddenly pronounces himself a changed man and produces "the books to prove it", consisting of several titles of real, well-known self-help books. These books make the journey with the heroes and, seemingly after one read-through, manage to correct character flaws and induce positive developments in all the protagonists. On the other hand, the source of the Evil Queen's wicked nature seems to stem from one event—once it is revealed that she is actually Virginia's missing mother, Tony then reveals that she attempted to drown Virginia as a little girl because she was 'sick and getting worse and worse', a rather vague statement of mental illness. And it was this instability that made her easy prey for Snow White's Wicked Stepmother.
- To be fair, Wolf as a character acts as Plucky Comic Relief most of the time, and even after enthusiastically devouring (pardon the pun) the self-help books with all their clichéd phrases and pop-psychology he's still half-werewolf and can't entirely control his urges (such as during full moon).
- Averted on The Colbert Report. While the character Colbert is clearly very screwed up, the writers introduce new reasons for him to be that way about as often as they introduce new screwups. One fan theory is that the character is exhibiting symptoms of PTSD - again, from a whole bucket of different traumas, ranging from his abusive parents to his repressed homosexuality. Either way, he's clearly not going to be 'fixed' any time soon.
- On 30 Rock, Jack gets Tracy an appointment with the staff therapist to deal with Tracy's combative attitude. Over the therapist's objection, the two start up a role-playing session with Jack playing Tracy's dad, mom, the upstairs neighbor, Tracy himself, the man his mom ran off with (in a rapid-fire stream of comical impersonations)...and within a minute Tracy is weeping and cured!
- Subverted in Slings And Arrows. The main character goes crazy for a while after his fiancee cheats on him with his director, but years later (after that specific trauma has been dealt with) he is still experiencing unpredictable mood swings and the like.
Real Life
- Some of Freud's early formulations suggested that once you unearthed someone's big ol' trauma, they were cured. However, he became dissatisfied with this idea once he noticed some of his patients relapsing. That did not prevent some of his more dogmatic followers from mining this trope for many decades to come.
- There is actually a bit of truth here — but the 'one trauma' tends to be more of 'taking out the keystone of the coping mechanism arch' in its effect. All the other traumas were being dealt with healthily right up until this one trauma came along and, well, if you've ever seen what happens to an arch when the keystone is removed...
Video Games
- The Asylum
 : Psychiatric Clinic for Abused Cuddly Toys is a Flash game based entirely on this trope; every toy so far has one, singular psychological issue and once you get them to face it and accept it, they are cured. The process of treating each of the insane plush toys is incredibly complex and risky, though, and a mis-treatment can cause them to completely revert to their original state; so at least the game subverts Epiphany Therapy. That said, the Ridiculously Cute Critter and Kick The Dog factor alone makes the headaches worth it.
- Justified (or subverted maybe?) with the toy snake: he doesn't have "an issue" at all. He's got a tail full of hallucinogens. The secret to curing him is keeping him coherent long enough to find this out, then performing surgery.
- The Big Bad and some of the asylum patients in Psychonauts can be cured through finding out what their specific issue is and then defeating the level boss in order to cure them. To be fair, this battle is going on inside their minds rather than outside their heads and much of the cure seems to be sorting out their problems on a very deep level in a metaphorical fashion.
- Also averted in that you also help relieve emotional baggage, remove the clutter of figments, clean up the mental cobwebs, and unlock mental vaults to further cement their sanity. Though any major problems can probably be fixed with a boss battle.
- Also averted in that the slide-shows reveal in pictures nuances to the character's issues, without bogging narrative with exposition and explanation, without slowing down gameplay, and without going over the heads of the intended audience.
Webcomics
- Luna Travoria in Dominic Deegan is not only played completely straight, but mind bogglingly stupid. Luna is very attractive, smart, and highly skilled in magic. She is perfect outside of one single flaw: two small tusks. An easily fixable problem, but neither she nor her excessively cruel family (which fixate on this single problem as to why she's "inferior") would ever consider it. Instead, she would rather attempt suicide. Every single psychological problem stems from either her tusks or excessively cruel treatment as a result of them.
- Er...to be fair, wouldn't that be double issue psychology? Strange appearance and years of abuse at the hands of a family almost entirely comprised of gold diggers?
- Not to mention emotional trauma from rejection from every single suitor for a year, on top of/because of her mother's abuse, which is best described as "trying to drive Luna to suicide".
- Also worth noting that there are magicians in the setting which could permanently fix her tusks (and a later missing tooth for the title character), but both of them refuse to go to an Alterationist, finding them "creepy." In their defense, the only example we've seen of Alteration magic was when an injured student used a spell to fix a permanent shoulder wound by plugging it with an extra eyeball.
- Nor was it Luna's decision ot not go to an alterist, it was her mothers. She just went with it after regaining self esteem.
- In Megatokyo, Piro and particularly Kimiko are subject to a whole host of deep and troublesome issues (Kimiko's boss directly identifies Kimiko as the 'neurotic, messed up kind of actor') but none of them have any real source or solution. Largo and Erika on the other hand tie many of their issues to a single event, one which both of them prove extremely melodramatic about.
- Parodied in these two Sluggy Freelance strips.
- Averted and lampshaded in The Class Menagerie. "And you're always bugging everyone to work hard so you'll fit in, right?" "No, I'm just a perfectionist. This doesn't define all my traits, you know."
Western Animation
Web Original
|
|
