Hideously deformed at birth, his mother was horrified by his appearance and his father refused to even look at him.
The Character Erik Erik was born in a small town on the outskirts of Rouen, France. In this paper, the major differences in how those two theorists might interpret Erik’s personality will be discussed. He maintained that genetic predispositions allow humans to react to stimuli within a certain range, and where within that range our behavior falls is determined by how we are shaped by the influence of the environment we find ourselves. Skinner, however, believed that all behavior, and hence personality, are learned as a function of environmental factors.Ī behavior that is reinforced will likely to be repeated, one that is punished will most likely not. Freud also determined 5 psychosexual stages that must be negotiated and satisfied during childhood development, failure on doing so will result in aberrant personality traits. Order custom essay Analysis of Erik, Phantom of the Opera Using Two Contrasting Personality Theoriesįreud’s emphasis on personality development was on the continuous struggle between the id and the superego, and how successfully the ego can manage a healthy balance between them. While Freud maintained that the unconscious is the underlying driving force from which personality develops, Skinner rejected all non-observable parameters such as thoughts, feelings, emotions, and the unconscious in his scientific analysis of human behavior. These two theorists were chosen because they represent polar opposites on how personality is viewed. The character Erik will be described below based on the translated work of Leroux (1910/1990), followed by an analysis of his personality using concepts derived from (1) the Freudian theory of psychoanalysis, and (2) the Skinnerian radical behaviorism concept.
The history of Erik was revealed in the novel mostly by the character Persia (also known as the Persian or the daroga), a local police chief in Persia that followed Erik to Paris. The original novel gave little direct details with respect to Erik’s past what was abundant however were hints and implications about the character’s life history throughout the book (Leroux, 1910/1990).Įrik was actually not his birth name but rather a name given to him by accident, and Leroux had simply called him “the man’s voice” in the novel Erik, however, had referred himself as “the opera ghost” and “the angel of music” throughout the texts (Leroux, 1910/1990). The tremendously popular and well-known Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 1986 musical production of The Phantom of the Opera was based on the French novel Le Fantome de l'Opera written by Gaston Leroux in1910 (Leroux, 1910/1990).
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