The film "Priest"
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The film Priest was a controversial work which delved perhaps too deeply for some audiences into issues of child abuse and dysfunctional behavior not only among priests but within the family. The abusive father, Phil, gives a detailed and even academic defense of the incest he practices. The subject is introduced into the film by his daughter, who confesses to the priest that her father makes her "do things." It is evident that she is very troubled by this and that it has affected her life. It is known that those who are abused tend to become abusers themselves, which means not only that she might one day be an abuser, but that her father may have been abused himself as a child and so is carrying this behavior over into the next generation. The development of this sort of behavior has been approached in different ways by theorists such as freud, Kohlberg, and others, all trying to explain the reason why this behavior develops and what it means to those affected by it. The character of the abuser in the movie Priest is an interesting case study who can be analyzed using methods developed by these theorists. The first reaction of the priest is to have the girl tell her father that this has to stop and that the priest has said so. He also tells the girl not to tell her mother, who does not know. It is clear that the mother does not know, and Phil, the father, is completely unrepentant. Phil is an extremely arrogant man who has convinced hismelf that he is not doing any
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reason to discern which principles ought to be followed; personal autonomy in their entitlement to pursue their own visions of the good in their own way. These aspects of autonomy stem from the themes of social contractarianism and personal liberty, respectively.
Phil violently asserts his right to moral and personal autonomy, but he fails to give the same right to his daughter, for he has taken away her autonomy in all realms and is preventing her from developing as she should.
Sigmund Freud developed a theory of the dynamics of the human kind and gave birth to psychoanalytic theory and practice as a way of analyzing human behavior and addressing human problems. While Freud is not usually thought of in terms of moral theory, his conception of the sources of human behavior has a moral component and explains human behavior in terms of childhood development, demonstrating how the individual learns to tell right from wrong and what psychological damage may be caused by discordances between the individual's moral sense and his or her behavior or even tendencies toward certain behavior. Freud's approach indicates that there are certain innate processes at work, but there is also a dependence on the family structure for the sp
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Sigmund Freud, Adam Smith, , Piaget Kohlberg, John Rawls, III Postconventional, II Conventional, social exchange, stage child, DL Silk, Blau Social, moral development, stages moral, personal autonomy, human behavior, Diana Meyers, process social exchange, reciprocate future, child seeks, psychoanalytic theory, process social, stages moral development, stage child seeks,
Approximate Word count = 1664
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)
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