Subjects:
The “Looking Glass Self Theory” was a big theme in this film. These people of this institution had no sense of self until McMurphy arrived. Mc Murphy helped them realize who they are. Head nurse Ratched made them feel like they were nothing. She would tell them they are wrong for feeling the way they feel. For example, when Harding was telling the nurse about how he speculated his wife was cheating on him, the nurse would ask him if he ever speculated that it was his mental problem that made him feel that way. The only sense of self they had until McMurphy arrived, was that they were nothing but mental cases, portrayed to them by the nurse.
McMurphy helped them realize a different sense in se
. . .
------------------------------------------------------------------------
**Bibliography**
. And they suffer a variety of symptoms: Billy's stuttering, the Chief's apparent deaf-muteness, Harding's uncontrollable hands. If someone got loud or out of control, they would electricut them, and put them to sleep. He took them fishing, got them to beat the nurses in basketball, and showed them that they didn’t need this place. McMurphy taught them a new sense of life. First thing you know he'll begin to think she's tougher than he is. As the Chief says when he looks at himself in the mirror, "It don't seem like I ever have been me. The staff wouldn’t allow the residents to have their own thoughts. " Harding's explanation of life in the hospital seems to a large extent to be true. Bibbit, who dominated her son at home just as her friend Nurse Ratched dominates him in the hospital, Vera Harding, whose sneering attacks on her husband's effeminacy destroyed his spirit, and minor characters like Nurse Pilbow, so terrified of the sexuality McMurphy represents. He came to the hospital, he says, out of "Guilt. He built the confidence that they needed. McMurphy made the men of the institution realize that that they should stand up for themselves, because they’re not dumb.
Essay's Topics
All research is for reference purposes only.