The Psychoanalytic Perspective of the Main Characters in the American TV Series Friends

As a recognized classic of American TV series,“Friends”tells the complex story of friendship,love between six distinctive American young people.Different family backgrounds and childhood experiences presented in TV dramas take account for their difference in traits.Through the theoretical concept of psychoanalytic literature,this article attempts to reveal how the specific influence and manifestation of the family situation and parental behavior have on the character and behavior of the protagonist,as well as to further analyze how the trauma suffered in childhood functions in adult behavior.As adults,their behavior and habits are still constrained and influenced by their childhood experiences.

Freud’s Theory and the Group Mind Theory:Formulations

This study aimed to reconsider some concepts of the psychoanalytic theory on group mind. Group psychology is concerned with the individual man as a member of a race, nation, caste, profession, or an institution, or as a component of a crowd of people that has been organized into a group at some particular time, for some specific purpose. Group psychology embraces an immense number of separate issues and offers investigators with countless problems, which have hitherto not even been properly distinguished from one another. Reflections presented in this paper were particularly inspired by Freud’s work on Group psychology and analysis of the ego and approaches to the chaos theory, especially, the fact that groups emerge as systems that exhibit unstable, aperiodic and highly complex behavior, with a tendency to self-organization.

How does the‘environment’come to the person?The‘ecology of the person’and addiction

Currently,psychiatry lacks a field that can be called“theoretical psychiatry”,which uses theoretical concepts and explanatory models:The main stream of research is to collect data of all kinds in the hope that the computational Big Data approach will shed a bright light on the black box of mental disorders.Accordingly,the biology-based Research Domain Criteria of the National Institute of Mental Health have been established.However,as philosophical analyses of concepts and methods have shown,several epistemological gaps stand in the way of a consistent multilevel understanding of mental disorders.Also,the implicit ontological problems in the biological reduction of the psychosocial level and in the integration of so-called hard and soft disciplines are mostly left out.As a consequence,a non-reductive psychological theory of mental disorders is sought that also integrates correlating biological and sociological issues.In this context,one example of promising nonreductive psychiatric research is the option of systems/network psychopathology.The possibilities for integrating different psychological perspectives are highlighted for the field of addiction research and treatment,where pragmatic behaviorist approaches dominate over the theorybased practice of psychoanalysis.In comparing the theoretical constructs of these two approaches,the relevance of the concept of“(social)environment”as the wealth of influential sociocultural factors is discussed at levels superior to the interpersonal micro-level,namely the organizational meso-and societal macro level,which is not sufficiently considered in current biopsychiatry.On this basis of argumentation,the usefulness of grounding and framing psychiatry through the field of ecological sciences,especially human ecology,is demonstrated.Finally,to this end,an outline of an ecological model of mental health and illness is presented.