Sweeney+Todd

media type="youtube" key="L_hgrfZVlJA" height="390" width="640" Sweeney Todd Personality Assessment By Jennifer Donnelly

=**Biography **=

In 2007, Tim Burton directed a motion picture called //Sweeney Todd// that focused around one central character (Zanuck, 2007). Benjamin Barker was a prominent barber who lived in London and fell deeply in love with Lucy, a beautiful woman. Together they had a daughter together named Joanna. An evil judge also thought his wife was beautiful. This Judge Turpin took his wife away from him and wrongfully imprisoned Mr. Barker for fifteen long years. Upon his return to London, Benjamin took up the new name of Sweeney Todd. Sweeney became a barber on Fleet Street at the same shop he used to have several years before. A woman by the name of Mrs. Nellie Lovett owns the place with a meat shop downstairs and the barber shop on the second floor. Now a very disturbed man, Sweeney becomes a mass murderer when he starts killing people who come in for a shave while Mrs. Lovett cooks up their dead bodies in to meat pies.

=**Psychoanalytic Perspective**=

The psychoanalytic perspective to personality was developed by Sigmund Freud in the late eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds (Huntington, 2011). He emphasized the importance of repressed drives that lead to our behavior. The id, the ego, and the superego were three ideas that Freud developed that were always struggling against each other. Superego was the good decision, id was bad, and superego was the balance between the two.

To study Sweeney’s personality, Sigmund Freud would want to understand how his unconscious mind works through hypnosis, free association, and dream analysis. In dream association, if he saw a man he might think meat or if he saw a judge he might say the word revenge. Under dream analysis, disturbing events that occur would show off Sweeney’s dark personality. For example, if he dreamed about a day in his life, there would be the manifest content of being a barber. The latent content that is the huge part underlying the hidden meaning is that he is grudgingly waiting for the Judge and the Beadle to come back in.

There are three unconscious structures of the mind that would have to be analyzed as well. These are the id, ego, and superego. Mr. Todd’s ego is driven by the primitive motivations of sex, food, and aggression. He wants revenge on the Judge Turpin, who stole his wife, to get his wife back so he can have her all to himself to sleep with. Under his unconscious food drive, he kills the people in his barber shop so that Mrs. Lovett can cook them up downstairs for supper. His aggression is expressed through his always seeking to harm and murder people in a very violent way of slitting open their throats and throwing their bodies into fires.

His superego shows off his great morals of protection and caring. His love for his wife and daughter are his internalized social norms that drive his superego. More than anything, Todd wants them to be safe, cared for, and back in his arms. He tried his best for them as Benjamin Barker and still tries to do what he can even for Mrs. Lovett. Their business grows and expands greatly while he is there, expanding her meat supply and attracting customers. He also takes in the little boy with Mrs. Lovett. Together, they become a beautiful family.

The ego tries to balance these two forces very much in opposition with one another. His desire to kill eventually overcomes the yearning for a family. His id dominates, winning over the superego as he murders his wife, his daughter, his partner Mrs. Lovett and several others. The ego, however, is his reality of being a barber in London. He shaves men’s faces, watches over an adopted son, and works with his wife the baker in their business on Fleet Street.

The defense mechanisms involved attempt to maintain the demanding task of balancing the id and the ego (Huntington, 2011). These mechanisms protected Todd from his reality by creating these perceptions to diminish his anxiety. Very little while in London did Todd think about his time in prison, using repression and denial to hold back his memories. Todd also made use of the projection and displacement defense mechanisms. After Sweeney found out that he had just killed his wife, he went after Mrs. Lovett and threw her into a fire to burn alive. Acting out was one of the most apparent uses of this psychoanalytic concept. Sweeney Todd's extreme behavior displayed his inward turmoil. The problems he had escalated as he started killing people, acquaintances, family, and strangers alike. Both Mrs. Lovett and Sweeney Todd use rationalization when they turn Todd's killings into a profitable business and contributing back to society. They use the dead bodies and bake them into meat pies, thus growing their restaurant business, feeding the public, and stimulating the economy.

The development of Sweeney’s psyche has had his libido centered in five different psycho sexual stages. Benjamin, the name he took at that time of his childhood, successfully made it through all of his stages. These include the oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital stages. Their success is shown through his development without becoming fixated on dependency, oral acquisition, neatness, anal-retentive characteristics, inability to love, narcissism, or vanity. His latency stage competence of academic and social pursuits is shown by becoming London’s most successful barber and through his genital stage by involving himself in a mature relationship with his lovely wife.

=**Cognitive Perspective**=

The cognitive approach describes personality by the active human thought, individuality, and cognitive processes that distinguish humans as unique (Huntington 2011). The situation, emotions, and unconscious are underemphasized and instead use simple thought processes. Julain Rotter, Kurt Lewin, George Kelly, and Albert Bandura were leaders of this field and developed theories describing concepts such as Gestalt psychology, locus of control, observational learning, and field dependency.

As according to Gestalt psychology, Sweeney Todd was seeking meaning in his environment. He organized his perceptions that he received to fit these meanings. According to Kurt Lewin, his field theory would have described Sweeney’s life space as being under all his external and internal forces of love, work, family, and hurt as working together and interacting. These and other forces drove Sweeney Todd to be the barber on Fleet Street who would slit throats and become detached from people. This behavior is due to contemporaneous causation when all his love, sadness, and anger would all in the moment build up and make him act this way.

Sweeney’s cognitive style of dealing with his sorrow is to let it build up over a large period of time, several years, before lashing out against all of humanity in particular those who hurt him or those he was close to. Todd is field independent. He is consistent in his beliefs that “we all deserve to die” and that “There’s a hole in the world like a great black pit and it’s filled with people who are filled with shit and the vermin of the world inhabit it…” (Zanuck, 2007). Sweeney’s categorization fills all of life into this hole of understanding. New things that happen and old things that already have are all lumped into this one category of misery, thus being unable to recognize anything or anyone good when he sees them. This is all a part of his personal construct in his sad understanding of the world that people are bad and the world is evil.

He is a solitary man, always in his own mind even when around other sociable people like Mrs. Lovett. He is a nonconformist, challenging attitudes, norms, and beliefs, such as when he confronts Mr. Pirelli about when his miracle hair elixir smells like urine. He also gives little eye contact except to the people he wants to kill or those that he loves. His schema is just all negative all the time. He is the epitome of doom and gloom. In everyday interactions, he knows how to follow society’s norms enough to wean off suspicion from most and to be a good barber with the average chitchat. He can follow the barber shop script very well. However, on the inside he is a very depressed man with suppressed feelings. As a child, he probably preferred to play with himself than with others.

Mr. Todd’s control of attention is directed towards his environmental salient cues such as the blades in his hand and the filth walking the streets due to his individual differences. His social intelligence lacks emotional knowledge of empathy, humor, trust, or compassion but excels in mistrust, deceit, passion, and love. Sweeney’s explanatory style entails a lot of pessimism and also some learned helplessness. People are going to hurt you and that you cannot do much about it. He explains this to Mrs. Lovett when he says “Because in all of the whole human race, Mrs. Lovett, there are two kinds of men and only two. There's the one staying put in his proper place, and the one with his foot in the other one's face.” (Zanuck, 2007). There is this norm of obedience he understands that people follow where people suffer under the abused power of others.

Sweeney Todd has an outcome expectancy that he will kill people, which he receives reinforcement value from Mrs. Lovett who is then has more meat supply to make her pies. His behavior potential then increases over time as he repeats this action over and over again, having great potential to perform the behavior again when the situation arises. Todd's generalized expectancies that he and all of humanity are bad people go along with his specific expectancies that when he is giving a shave in his barber shop he can kill the individual as according to this particular situation.

Julian Rotter describes three of the six psychological needs of a person as love and affection, physical comfort, and protection-dependency. These are characteristic of Benjamin Barker, a man deeply in love with his wife. The remaining three psychological needs are dominance, independence, and recognition-status. Sweeney Todd shows his dominance by murdering people, independence through no longer relying on others, and recognition-status through competing in a shaving contest to be recognized as the best barber in London. Rotter's concept of the external locus of control matches Sweeney's views of society; the world is terrible to people and that everyone commits wrong against everyone else.

Albert Bandura also had an important role in cognitive psychology. He came up with the self-system where each individual has functional reasons for how they act in their environment and how they think about themselves. For Todd, his self-system was filled with negativity, and his rationalization for his murders was that he was doing charity to rid the world of its people. Todd would have learned this aggressive behavior from observational learning similar to that of the Bobo doll experiment (Huntington, 2011). In this experiment, children learn to beat and use hostility through demonstration by an adult. Todd could have grown up in an environment filled with aggression and learned how to do the same by paying attention to it, remembering it later, physically being able to do the behavior, and having a motivation to do so. To further enhance the learning, the aggression would have shown to have a positive reward, behaviors that were not too complex, fitting observer characteristics, and a suitable model. Self-efficacy also has a role in how Todd reacts and in what he believes. His self-efficacy would provide him with a belief to be competent in what he does. For example, Sweeney would think of himself as great at being a barber from previous experiences of doing well, but bad at making new friends from knowing he has struggled to do so in the past.

=**Discussion**=

A problem with Freud’s psychoanalytic description of Todd’s personality is that Freud would have called young Benjamin Barker as a success who completed all of their stages without any strong fixations. This perspective does not recognize adulthood as it should and for a large part ignores the development post adolescence. In addition, his conscious mind seems to be id dominated and studying the unconscious is not necessary. His behavior is expressed with great amounts of aggressive and violent behavior. These are not hidden deep thoughts that need to be extracted through dream analysis, hypnosis, or free association. However, Freud was very accurate in predicting that people have this aggressive drive and a person begin beaten down by society. Sweeney embodies this concept perfectly. Also, the acting out, rationalization, projection, and other defense mechanisms provide very reasonable descriptions for why Todd was behaving so strangely. Additionally, the psychoanalytic approach tends to be very pessimistic; it would not include a way to improve his lifestyle positively but instead just assess what is going wrong.

The cognitive style of explanation provides a fairly accurate description. The concepts suit well in describing Todd, including those of of life space, field independence, field theory, control of attention, and others. This perspective also shows off Sweeney's unique and individual characteristics, which thankfully explain how he is different from other people. His cognitive skills in perceiving a situation or life in general can be very different from how another person would see the same situation taking place. There are some disadvantages to this perspective as well. It lacks biological reasoning or role of the environment as potential underlying causes for his behavior. These can be incredibly important to understand how he interacted with his environment after getting out of prison or what predispositions he had for certain for behaviors.

=References=

Huntington, A. (2011). Chapter 3: //Psychoanalytic Aspects of Personality//. [Powerpoint slides]. Retrieved from [] Huntington, A. (2011). Chapter 7: //Cognition.// [Powerpoint slides]. Retrieved from [] Zanuck, R. D., Logan, J., Parkes, W. F., MacDonald, L. (Producers) & Burton, T. (Director). (2007). //Sweeney Todd// [Motion picture]. United States: Pinewoods Studio.