Rationalization When we feel hurt or disappointed, rationalization provides a defense for the anxiety produced by a bruised ego.

For example, a student who is failing algebra may rationalize the situation by stating, I dont know why I need this course anyway. Compensation Compensation is used for coping with anxiety that results from feelings of inferiority or perceived weaknesses. The individual focuses on his or her accomplishments or strengths. This defense can be healthy, or it can be an attempt to avoid certain troubling aspects of oneself. Projection Projection is attributing to others ones own unacceptable desires, feelings or impulses. Its a way of believing that certain characteristics belong to someone else rather than taking responsibility for them. For example, lets say someone is involved in a situation that he or she was unable to handle. The circumstances caused the person to feel like a coward. But, these feelings are projected onto someone else, and the cowardice of another is to blame for the outcome of the situation. Reaction Formation When someone is confronted with disturbing desires or impulses, he or she may actively express the opposite impulse. This involves openly displaying a certain attitude that is opposite of disturbing repressed traits. For example, someone who masks negative reactions to another by being overly nice. Repression Repression is one of the most important psychoanalytical concepts. It involves an unconscious process of blocking painful thoughts and feelings from awareness. Though hidden in the unconscious, these painful thoughts and emotions influence current behavior. Identification Identification can be an attempt to overcome inferiority by taking on the characteristics of someone important, such as a parent or teacher, but it is often part of a more natural development process. In the former, the individual feels that doing so will help her to be perceived as worthwhile, and self-worth is enhanced. Identification is adaptive in that it creates a process of assuming culturally appropriate behaviors, but it can also be negative when it is used to mask feelings of inferiority. Fantasy Fantasy involves retreating to a safe place in ones own mind. It can be a very useful defense mechanism to deal with anxiety. But, it can also become addictive and negatively impact ones ability to deal with anxiety in the real world. Regression As children, we generally have few demands and rely on others for care. In the face of stress or anxiety, regression takes us back to these earlier times, causing immature and inappropriate behaviors for the individuals current stage of development. For example, an adult who gets sick and displays childlike behaviors to elicit the care of others. Sublimation

Sublimation involves redirecting unacceptable sexual or aggressive impulses to socially acceptable ones. An example would be someone with aggressive impulses who becomes a star athlete. Introjection Introjection involves incorporating into oneself the standards and values of another person. This defense can have positive or negative consequences. For example, it is positive when it involves incorporating appropriate parental values. But, it becomes negative if the parental values are not acceptable, such as when an abused child becomes an abusive parent. Undoing When a person acts inappropriately, it sometimes produces anxiety. To counter this anxiety, the person may try to negate the original behavior. For example, a child who becomes unruly at the dinner table but then offers to help during cleanup. Emotional Insulation Withdrawal into passivity to avoid disappointment or hurt is the main component of emotional insulation. For example, someone who really wants to ask someone out for a date but doesnt do so to avoid the prospect of rejection. Emotional insulation can prevent one from fulfilling many goals because the individual may avoid taking risks for fear of rejection or disappointment.

Questioning the Story:

Did the media attention from the movie help the real Patch Adams' efforts? No. In an interview with New Renaissance Magazine, the real Patch Adams responded to this question by saying the following, "After the movie, there wasn't a single positive article about our work or me. There were dumb, stupid, meaningless things... it made my children cry. They actually thought that they didn't know the person they were reading about." Patch admits that he never expected the movie to be a catalyst that would help spread his idea of care to the masses. "I knew the movie would do this," Adams said. "I would become a funny doctor. Imagine how shallow that is relative to who I am." Patch had dreamed that the film might help him to raise enough money to build a 40-bed hospital on 310 acres of land in Pocohontas County, West Virginia. In the least, he had hoped that the release of the movie would have raised some awareness to what he is doing, which includes being on the road 300 days out of the year, giving as many as eleven lectures a day and visiting the sick all over the world, in countries such as Russia, Bosnia, Cuba, and Afghanistan. Did allowing the movie to be made help Patch's cause at all? The real Patch Adams didn't receive much money for the rights to his story. Universal Pictures did however give Patch's Gesundheit Institute a grant to establish a fundraising infrastructure. This included the services of a professional fundraiser for a period of time. Was Patch happy with Robin Williams' performance in the movie? In a CNN interview, Patch said the following, "I think Robin himself is compassion, generosity and funny. I like to think that that's who I am, and so I think he was the only actor I wanted to play me, and I think he did a fabulous job, and my friends around the country are feeling that he gives that basic message." Pictured at left is Robin Williams laughing with the real-life Hunter 'Patch' Adams.

Is Patch's girlfriend in the movie based on a real person? No. In the movie, Patch's girlfriend is a fellow med student by the name of Corinne Fisher (Monica Potter). Corinne, who dies at the end of the film, is only very loosely based on Patch's real life wife Lynda, who Patch did meet at medical school like in the movie. As the real Patch Adams explained in an interview, certain aspects of his real life romance with his wife Lynda were injected into the film. This includes the room-full-of-balloons scene. "I filled my apartment with balloons from floor to ceiling. With twenty or so people in the room, no one could see anybody else, but whenever one person moved, everybody could feel it. It was a circus of sensations. She went back to the dorm and told her friends; "I just had the strangest date of my life. I think I'm going to marry this guy." Lynda and Patch were married in 1972 and have two sons. Why did Hunter 'Patch' Adams decide to go by the name Patch? "Oh, Hunter is a Southern-boy name, and during the civil rights movement I was interested in abandoning all the parts of my Southern heritage," Patch said during an interview with CNN. He opted for the name Patch after his stay at a mental hospital. At the hospital, one of the patients who he became friends with dubbed him 'Patch', because his friendship had patched up the loneliness in the patient's life. Did the real Patch Adams really contemplate suicide like in the film? Yes. Like Robin Williams' character in the film, the real Patch Adams did in fact contemplate suicide. After Patch's father passed away of a heart attack when they were stationed in Germany, Patch's family moved back home and had to adjust to civilian life in suburban northern Virginia. For a short time, they stayed with his aunt and uncle. His uncle was a lawyer and an independent thinker, who quickly became Patch's surrogate father. Even after he, his mother, and his brother moved into their own house, Patch still spent a lot of time talking to his uncle.

Early during his freshman year in college, the uncle who Patch admired committed suicide. It didn't happen long after his high school girlfriend Donna had broke up with him. Just before Halloween in 1964, an extremely depressed Patch Adams dropped out of college. In an interview, he discussed his thoughts of suicide: "I obsessed about suicide every day but needed to work up to it, so I went to a cliff near the college called Lover's Leap and sat at the edge, writing epic poetry to Donna. I composed sonnets, searching for the right words that would really get to her. If I had ever finished my outpourings I would have jumped. Fortunately, I was too long-winded. After a disastrous visit with Donna, I took a Greyhound bus home and trudged six miles through snow to my mother's doorstep. When she opened the door I told her that I'd been trying to kill myself so she'd better check me into a mental hospital." Did Patch really decide he wanted to be a doctor during his stay at a mental hospital? Yes. After considering suicide, Patch Adams advised his mother to check him into a psychiatric facility. It was there that he realized that many of the patients around him suffered from extreme lonliness. They didn't have people in their lives who loved them as did he. He made friends with the patients, and he soon discovered that the key to human happiness is having loving and caring people in your life. It was then that he decided that the best way to spread his newfound knowledge was by becoming a doctor. Patch became "a student of life, of happy life. I wanted to know everything possible about people and happiness and friendship," Patch says. He had been a student of science since he was a boy,

and he always had a desire to be a doctor. His temporary stay at the mental hospital provided him with the right motivation to become one. How old was the real Patch Adams when he ended up in a mental hospital? The film depicts a mid-life Patch (Robin Williams) staying at a mental hospital. In reality, Patch Adams endured three different mental hospitalizations when he was much younger, during the time when he was 17 and 18-years-old. How did the real Patch Adams learn to interact with strangers? Making someone who is sick smile is not always an easy thing to do. During an interview with Spirit in the Smokies Magazine, Patch discussed how he taught himself to relate to other human beings, "I experimented with friendliness by calling hundreds of wrong numbers, pretending to be a sociology student, or anything that would help me draw people out. Out in public I engaged strangers in conversation as much as possible. For example, I rode elevators to see how many floors it would take to get the occupants introduced to one another, and even singing songs." Knowing how to make friends was never a secret to Patch. When he was a boy his father was in the army and his family moved around a lot. They lived in places like Germany, Japan, Texas, and Oklahoma. He learned to make friends at new schools and in different cultures. Does the real Patch Adams have any children? Yes. Patch and his wife Lynda have two sons, Lars and Zag. What is Patch Adams' Gesundheit Institute? Gesundheit is the German word for health. Germans and Americans say gesundheit when someone sneezes to wish them good health. The vision of Dr. Hunter 'Patch' Adams, the Gesundheit Institue is a health community spread out over 310 acres of land in Pocahontas County, West Virginia. For years there have been plans to build a 40-bed hospital on the grounds, but funding has yet to come through. If built, the hospital/healing community would practice holistic medicine, which is an approach to medical care that focuses on the human body's ability to heal itself without the use of prescription drugs and similar over-the-counter medications. Holistic medicine encompasses acupuncture, biofeedback, faith healing, folk medicine, meditation, megavitamin therapy, yoga and other natural healing methods. What is Patch Adams' Vision of a perfect world? With families and other volunteers living on the grounds of the Gesundheit Institute, it seems to be Patch's own island community isolated from the rest of society. If so, what is the real Patch Adams' vision for this community? When interviewed on the Art Bell show, Patch said the following about his idea for a society based on compassion and generosity, "there would be integration of all people. See, right now, in the current system of profit, care has been relegated to the burden category: the burden of our elderly, the burden of our poor, the burden of our mentally ill, the burden of the criminal elementand these are all burdenswhere it's really the multinational corporations that are getting the gigantic cuts in subsidies and benefits but we never hear about them being our burden. And so though we ...in the world that I'm working for we wouldn't need mental hospitals; we would have ...one, people would not be working all the time just to make money to consume more; they would ...the work would be connected to the integration of their community."

Patch Adams Reflection

In Patch Adams, Robin Williams portrays a doctor who strives to "improve the quality of life." The movie is a perfect example of many cases of sacramental awareness and the sacrament of Annointing of the Sick. Patch encounters a "once-brilliant" man in a psychiatric clinic. Arthur Mendelson helps hunterThe first character Patch meets is Arthur Mendelson. Arthur influences Patch's ability to see through problems. In a Christ-like manner, we must see through and past the problems and look ahead toward the solution. Christ died for our sins by looking past the problem. Patch also helps his roommate , Rudy, out. This brings on a revelation for Patch which lets him see through the scientific names of diseases. He learns to treat the person, not the disease. When he agrees to become a doctor, Patch is not only venturing into the field to physically heal people but also more importantly to spiritually heal people. This parallels Annointing of the Sick After meeting his two close friends, Truman and Carin, Patch desires to reach out and help people, not to bury himself in his books. His friends quickly jump on the bandwagon and help him to carry out his theories. The sacramental awareness of Patch's roommate is questionable until we find that he is genuinely good in the end. However, Dean Walcot is up until the end a foe of Patch's. He is concerned with the physical aspect of healing much more than the spiritual aspect of healing. In the old church, Annointing of the Sick was sometimes believed to be physical. The spiritual aspect of healing would later be brought back into effect rightfully. When Patch is treating patients in his clinic, he exhibits great sacramental awareness by simply admittin that we are a community that can help each other. He proclaims that everyone is both a doctor and a patient. Patch also nears the meaning of the sacrament of Annointing of the Sick. He heals people in a beautiful way. He helps people look inside and heal..