Perks Of Being A Wallflower Movie Analysis Essay

Stephen Chbosky once said “We accept the love we think we deserve.” Most movies have creative directors behind them and with that, comes a more individualistic, special, and well written style of storytelling through their literature background. Stephen Chbosky, who also wrote the novel based film adaptation, codirected and wrote the screenplay for Perks of Being a Wallflower. During his direction behind the camera, he was able to bring his story to life and the complex philosophies on the development and the recovery of specific trauma in the main characters which this paper will be looking through a critical lens of analysis. This paper will be discussing queer theory, cultural studies, psychoanalysis, and what they mean in the setting/characters

Starting with Sigmund Freud as he is especially known for studying and inventing the extent that can explain the process of the human mind psychologically and determining what causes the effect it has on the individual that is then displayed to the outside world, both aware and unaware. Freud also focuses on the healing techniques for the patient, discusses dream work, and the core of repression. In creating psychoanalysis, it can help explain and deduce the deeper mental attachments of what is happening inside of Charlie’s mind and his actions showing those attachments. Charlie has suffered from trauma from the death of his Aunt Helen, repressing sexual abuse from her, and the death of his best friend, Michael. Charlie is diagnosed with a mental illness called PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). Freud believes this repression emerges later in life at one point or another. One writing to note in Freud’s The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, he says, ““As the indifferent memories owe their preservation not to their own content but to an associative relation between their content and another which is repressed, they have some claim to be called “screen memories’” (34). This is to pay attention and understand that his memories make him why he is