Single-Issue Psychology: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

 

In real life psychological issues stem from many sources, some biological, some cognitive, and some related to experiences and memories, and overcoming them often takes lots of time effort, and sometimes medication. However, this is a little too complicated for fiction. It's much easier when all a person's problems stem from a single traumatic incident, and working through that single incident will instantly cure them, so fiction tends to represent psychology this way.

 

 

{{examples}}

== Anime and Manga ==

* In ''[[Nodame Cantabile]]'', Chiaki is unable to pursue his dream of becoming a world-class conductor because an incident in his childhood ({{spoiler|watching a man die while their plane was crashing at the age of 10}}) gave him a phobia of flying. Partially averted in relation to the cure of the phobia, since {{spoiler|Nodame's hypnosis compels him to get on a plane, but he's still terrified, and only after many times traveling without incident does he get used to the experience}}.

* [[Great Teacher Onizuka]] relies heavily on this trope. Nearly all of the students (and several of the other teachers) have incredibly hostile personalities, but once Onizuka finds out about the traumatic event in their pasts, one dramatic example is usually enough to at least tone them down, although many continue to struggle with their old problems throughout the series, or acquire new ones.

* Despite the page quote, the situation with [[Neon Genesis Evangelion|Asuka]] is a bit more complicated. Most of her mental issues reach back to her mother going insane and subsequently killing herself, fact, but it does seem as if she had problems beyond that. It's mentioned that her mother neglected Asuka even before her illness, and the rest of her childhood was apparently pretty bad too: her relationships with her father and stepmother seem to be horrible (in the flashback to the hanging scene, she mentions that she 'doesn't have a papa') and completely loveless respectively. She lumps them both in as people she ''hates''. Hearing her father and future stepmother going at it at the hospital probably contributed to her unhealthy attitude toward sex as well.

* Batman's entire life, obsession, and psyche hinges on the night his parents were killed in front of him. Later events (the death of the second Robin, nearly shooting Alexander Luthor, being cast through time by a mad god) merely add nuance to his behavior.

** [[Reconstructed Trope|Reconstructed]] in ''[[Batman Begins]]''. The death of Thomas and Martha Wayne were the main reason that lead Bruce to become the dark avenger that he was later, but it was still only one of the many incidents that contributed to it.

** Similar thing happens in ''The Dark Knight'', but the Joker does it to {{spoiler|Harvey Dent}} this time, and this time {{spoiler|it works, resulting in Two-Face}}. However, there are at least hints that Harvey was already on the slippery slope when the Joker pushed him off.

** There's also Two Face in the comics rather than the movie, who originally only had his scarring to contribute to his insanity. Eventually, he was given a severely screwed up mentality including issues due to [[Abusive Parents]] and problems with rage, which the scarring only pushed into pure insanity.

* [[Alan Moore]] actually deeply dislikes this trope, believing instead that characters should be complex enough that their personalities can't easily be encompassed by short blanket summaries. He mocked the concept in Writing for Comics: "I was just standing there, looking at my stamp album and the priceless collection that it had taken me years to build, [[Serious Business|when all of a sudden I realized that since I had foolishly pasted all of them directly into the album using an industrial-strength adhesive, they were completely worthless. I understood then that the universe was just a cruel joke upon mankind, and that life was pointless. I became completely cynical about human existence and saw the essential stupidity of all effort and human striving.]] At this point I decided to join the police force."

** However, the comic and even the live action films show even this as not being enough to keep Peter in the game at times and he leaves crimefighting, or tries to cash in, or tries to have his powers stripped away. Anytime he begins to act selfish, karma slaps him in the face and sets him straight.

* [[Magneto]] averts this, despite how most adaptations portray it. The Holocaust was as horrifyingly traumatic for him as you'd expect, but in the mainstream comics it actually took him a couple of decades worth of ''other'' horrifying incidents to make him into a supervillain. Principal amongst them is the murder of his daughter by an angry mob (and abandonment by his wife after going berserk with his new-found powers on them); followed by befriending and falling out with Charles Xavier over budding ideological differences after fighting Neo-Nazi's; then working for and being betrayed by a Western Intelligence agency so they could help a Nazi defect, killing his then-girlfriend in the process...[[Trauma Conga Line|and a few other things besides all that]]. It's only ''then'' that he actually becomes Magneto, and even after all that it was suggested his behaviour can be explained by his powers giving him Bi Polar Disorder and [[With Great Power Comes Great Insanity|driving him insane]], assuming he's not just a [[Jerkass]] because thats who he is.

* Mel Brooks' character in the movie ''[[High Anxiety]]'', arguably a parody of this sort of thing.

* Surprisingly averted in the movie ''[[Analyze This]]''. In a wacky comedy about a mobster's analyst, you'd expect there to be one big issue that would, when revealed, leave the mobster miraculously cured. Instead, there is one major trauma -- which, when touched upon, opens up a heaving wall of repressed guilt and grief, and renders the mobster an emotional wreck for weeks. After he pulls himself together he and his analyst agree that, while he's had a breakthrough, he's far from cured and needs a lot more therapy.

* In ''The President's Analyst'', the title character gets out of a forced defection to the USSR by getting his KGB captor to realize, in very short order, that he became a spy only out of fear of his father, who had arrested his mother in a Stalin-era purge. He does tell the spy that a cure through analysis is possible but would take years, which he couldn't possibly do if he were bundled off to Russia....

* Subverted in ''[[The Conversation]]''. Main character Harry Caul avoids his terror over having others harmed by his surveillance work by completely ignoring the consequences of what he does. At first, it seems like this is due to a vague job he did some years earlier involving a union dispute, but a [[Dream Sequence]] has him narrate his early childhood to an unconcerned female passerby {{spoiler|including how he accidentally killed a friend of his father's}}. In the end, this isn't even the worst of his problems.

* In ''[[Good Will Hunting]]'', Will, who has successfully fended off helpful and unhelpful psychotherapy throughout the movie, is cured of all his issues at the end by exchanging graphic memories of their respective abusive childhoods with Sean, then crying as Sean repeatedly tells him, "It's not your fault." It was cited by some critics as the one thing in the movie that seems like it was written by people as young as Matt Damon and Ben Affleck were at the time.

** I guess if you watch the film with this trope in mind it could come off that way, but the movie itself didn't seem to imply that he was all better now. Rather, he had finally turned a corner, admitted to himself what he was feeling and what he really wanted, and let himself be vulnerable with another person. This breakthrough gives him the confidence to face his fear of abandonment and pursue his love interest across the country. Facing a fear doesn't mean you aren't afraid anymore though...

 

 

* In ''[[Everybody Loves Raymond]]'', before Ray was born, Mamma used to play the old "airplane" game when feeding Robert, invariably touching his chin before she put the spoon in his mouth. When Ray came along and became the [[Parental Favoritism|eternal centre of attention]], Robert was left to fend for himself and subconsciously began touching his food to his chin the way Mom used to do. This never gets resolved. They just found out why he does it, but he didn't stop (though the audience now had [[The Woobie|one more reason to like him]]). His doing it then just fell into [[Running Gag]] status.

* The patient-of-the-week in any ''[[MASH|M*A*S*H]]'' episode that includes Dr. Sidney Freedman. And that Single Issue is almost always The War. There is at least one exception: the patient was Hawkeye, and the problem was rooted in a childhood experience in which his cousin pushed him off a boat. It was still a single issue, though. Possibly justified in the cases of most 'victims of the week', since Sidney was mostly just charged with getting a diagnosis so they could get a handle on what to do with the kid in question. Usually the diagnosis was "Send him home, he needs a lot more therapy than we can give him in the middle of a war zone."

* Subverted ''and'' played straight in ''[[The Tenth Kingdom]]'': Wolf's issues with food, love, and his animal urges are hilariously sent up in scenes with a New York Jewish psychiatrist, and after only ''one session'' (which he later describes to Virginia as "extensive therapy") he suddenly pronounces himself a changed man and produces "the books to prove it," consisting of several titles of real, well-known self-help books. These books make the journey with the heroes and, seemingly after one read-through, manage to correct character flaws and induce positive developments in all the protagonists. On the other hand, the source of [[Big Bad|the Evil Queen]]'s wicked nature seems to stem from one event: {{spoiler|once it is revealed that she is actually Virginia's [[Mysterious Parent|missing mother]], Tony then reveals that she attempted to drown Virginia as a little girl because she was 'sick and getting worse and worse', a rather vague statement of mental illness. And it was this instability that made her easy prey for [[The Man Behind the Man|Snow White's Wicked Stepmother.]]}}

** To be fair, Wolf as a character acts as [[Plucky Comic Relief]] most of the time, and even after enthusiastically devouring (pardon the pun) the self-help books with all their cliched phrases and pop-psychology he's still half-werewolf and can't entirely control his urges (such as during full moon).

** The Evil Queen was also {{spoiler|a could-have-been starlet with an unplanned-for daughter and a husband who went from business tycoon to janitor thanks to a lousy investment}}.

* Averted on ''[[The Colbert Report]]''. While the character Colbert is clearly ''very'' screwed up, the writers introduce new reasons for him to be that way about as often as they introduce new screwups. One fan theory is that the character is exhibiting symptoms of PTSD: again, from a whole bucket of different traumas, ranging from his abusive parents to his repressed homosexuality. Either way, he's clearly not going to be 'fixed' any time soon.

** Jack gets Tracy an appointment with the staff therapist to deal with Tracy's combative attitude. Over the therapist's objection, the two start up a role-playing session with Jack playing Tracy's dad, mom, the upstairs neighbor, Tracy himself, the man his mom ran off with (in a rapid-fire stream of comical impersonations)...and within a minute Tracy is weeping and cured...of his compulsion to transgress, anyway. He's still a complete madman otherwise.

** Jack helps Liz realize that her sexual issues stem from a childhood trauma involving rollerblades and a Tom Jones poster. While the trope is specifically [[Defied Trope|defied]] in that he assures her she'll still need years of therapy, they do realize that she can function much better if she avoids Tom Jones posters.

* ''[[Die Anstalt]]'' is a Flash game based entirely on this trope; every toy so far has one, singular psychological issue and once you get them to face it and accept it, they are cured. The process of treating each of the insane plush toys is incredibly complex and risky, though, and a mis-treatment can cause them to completely revert to their original state, so at least the game subverts [[Epiphany Therapy]]. That said, the [[Ridiculously Cute Critter]] and [[Kick the Dog]] factor alone makes the headaches worth it.

** Justified (or subverted maybe?) with the toy snake: {{spoiler|he doesn't have "an issue" at all. He's got a tail full of hallucinogens. The secret to curing him is keeping him coherent long enough to find this out, then ''performing surgery''.}}

** Also averted in that you also help relieve emotional baggage, remove the clutter of figments, clean up the mental cobwebs, and unlock mental vaults to further cement their sanity. Though any major problems can probably be fixed with a boss battle.

*** Also averted in that the slide-shows reveal in pictures nuances to the character's issues, without bogging narrative with exposition and explanation, without slowing down gameplay, and without going over the heads of the intended audience.

{{quote| '''Azula''': ''{Morose}'' My own mother... thought I was a monster... ''{Upbeat}'' She was right of course, but it still hurt.}}

** A very long <s>argument can be made</s> [[Internet Backdraft|fan war can be caused]] over Azula's sociopathy and her mother's opinion of her and which one is the cause and the effect. In fact, before it was edited out, there was one right on this page. However, whatever one's view, the end result of this episode seems to be that Azula is still as messed-up as ever and as Mai later admits to having fallen deeply in love with Zuko and Ty Lee joins a group of fighters in identical uniform and face paint, one assumes they got over their respective issues.

{{quote| '''Joker''': "Behind all the sturm and batarangs, you're just a little boy in a playsuit, crying for mommy and daddy! It'd be funny if it weren't so pathetic. Oh what the heck, I'll laugh anyway!"}}

* Inverted in ''Birdz'': Morty Storkowitz's regular patient, Mr. Nuthatch, has a different hang-up in every episode.

== Web Original ==

* Either neatly subverted or simply averted in ''[[Sailor Nothing]]''. At first, it looks like Himei is the way she is because she has to fight monsters. Then she goes on to explain she's been doing this for ''five years''. The war has gone nowhere, all that happens is that innocents get hurt, and it even gives examples of some of the worse fights, highlights of which include [[Nightmare Fuel|getting boiling fat poured on you, being attacked by a fireman (complete with axe) and being at the tender mercies of an evil ten year-old with a sharp pencil]].