I apologize for my previous remarks on this subject since they had only to
do wiht my little opinion and not with the realy subject at hand.
Here is what I meant to... or should have said:
Putting a character through pain and torment for the sake of character
development, although a good idea, there is something else to be taken into
consideration.
Not everyone is emotionally mature enough to actually learn how react to
such horrid circumstances. True, in many cases, when people are forced into
a situation where the elements are beyond their control, they take control
what they can control, in other words, they learn of themselves. They
recognize weaknesses and faults and find out that it was never on the
outside, but it was within in the first place.
NOW; here's the second path. When some people are faced with challenges,
they either fight irrationally or (the more common path) they run and hide.
If someone were to suffer from being abused when they were younger, they
could either develop their character and not let the past control how they
would act. I don't believe in the Fruedian way of thinking that says 'what
happens to you as a child shapes what you are as an adult and you can't do
anything about it.' What seperates us from animals is that we have something
they don't.
I'll try and illustrate;
For animals (and some people, sadly), this is how life is:
Stimulus(that which happens to us) ---> Response (how we react)
Yet, what makes the human being amazing is that we have the capacity to do
this:
Stimulus ---> Choice ---> Response
Based on principles that never change, we can choose how we react with the
help of out imagination, morality, and a few other factors.
This is the pattern of a one Victor Frankl. A man who was trained in the
Fruedian way of thinking...he was also a psychiatrist and a Jew. He was one
of the surivivors of the Nazi Halocaust. His entire family, save his sister,
were murdered in ways that we would rather hurt ourselves rather than
repeat. Through much self-discipline and failures, he discovered that though
his captors had more 'freedom' to do what they wanted, he discovered that he
had more 'liberty' than they, because he could decide how he would react.
True, they could torture, beat, and humiliate them to their hearts' content,
but they could never take away the last and greatest of the human freedoms.
But I digress;
Not all characters, after going through hell and back, become more than what
they were... some, sad to say, become less...
'Man who walks in front of car, gets tired. Man who stands behind car, get
exhausted.'
-Warhammer
http://www.geocities.com/teknos.geo/
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