The Psychological Need And Its Connection To The Ghost.

The hero’s problems do not solve for two reasons: The first is lack of information; the second is an earlier unsolved problem on the same subject.

Like us, a character has to evaluate information in order to resolve problems. When a character fixes his attention on something dangerous he is probably over-evaluating the information. When he is unable to fix his attention, it is because he cannot find information to evaluate.

This will become clearer to you when you have completed the following exercise in creating a back-story for your hero. This has a lot to do with the revelations your hero has along the way to their Self-revelation, near the end of the script.

1. List five problems, with people or objects or circumstances, which your hero is not solving in the present.
2. Now list what your hero wishes they knew about each one of the problems above. (The missing information they wish they had)
3. Now list how important your hero now feels these problems actually are or whether or not they are now solved.
4. If any of the five problems remain unsolved, list what your hero would have to do to solve them.

 Now let’s take a glance at the hero’s past. There are several problems, undoubtedly, which your hero will feel they didn’t solve.

1.  List five problems, with people or objects or circumstances, which your hero feels they didn’t solve in the past.
2. Now list what your hero wishes they had known about each one of the problems.
3. Now list how important these problems actually are to your hero’s present circumstances.
4. If any of the above problems still bother your hero, what would they have to do or know in order to resolve them?

Let us now take a look at the problems of the future. This deals with the actual script and your hero’s dealings with the opponent, minor opponents, and the opponent’s allies throughout the story. 

1. List five problems, with people or objects or circumstances which you think your hero will have to solve in the future.
2. Now list what your hero will have to do now to solve these problems in the future.
3. Now list how vital these problems may become to your hero’s existence.
4. If any of the above problems worry you, it is because you have not decided upon your hero’s course of action. Try to list your hero’s course as it will probably be taken in the script.

We should also include the Goals of the hero. Some poet once said that a man’s dreams were important and that when the last of a man’s dreams were dead, dead was the man.

Dreams, goals, ambitions, these are the stuff your hero uses for fuel. SURVIVAL is nothing but the effort to accomplish action. There is the broad goal of all survival. There is the small goal of a good action. SURVIVAL, action and goals are inseparable.
 
The hero’s happiness could be defined as the emotion of progress toward desirable goals. There is an instant of contemplation of the last goal in which your hero is content. But contentment becomes boredom immediately that new goals do not come to view. There is no more unhappy thing than a man who has accomplished all his ends in life. For instance Edward Gibbon (an English historian best known for his history of the Roman Empire), died immediately after finishing his great work. It is doubtful if men die when they have great goals ahead of them, except perhaps in the violent action of some attempted attainments. It is doubtful if it would take more than a flick with a feather to kill a character who has no goals. A neurotic without goals catches a harmless bug, sneezes and dies. Or sneezes and dies without a bug getting near him.

Your hero always has a goal. They often fail. When they have failed often enough they stop thinking about the future and start worrying over the present. When the present hands them a few failures they start worrying about the past. They go “out of present time”. If you were simply to walk through an insane asylum and tell each inmate, “Come up to Present Time” a small percentage would immediately become sane and stay sane. The order would unfix their attention from a past maybe or fix their attention on the present. It has been tried and has succeeded.

 
More happily, let’s brainstorm and examine your hero’s goals and fears—their psychological need.

1. List five goals your hero had in the past.
2. List what happened to the five goals in the past.
3. List five fears which your hero have in your present.
4. List five fears which you might expect your hero to encounter in the future.

Now go back over your lists and for each item in the goals columns, see if you can find some person in your hero’s past or present in your script who might have these goals or who might have had them. Some person other than the hero themselves.
 
Now go down the past and present and future fears column and see if you can find some person in your hero’s past who might have had these fears other than the hero.
 
When you have noted down these people or one person from your hero’s past, answer the following:

Is that character dead? Are those characters dead? Did they fail?
 
You should be able to sort out your hero’s own goals from “dead men’s goals”. And you should be able to sort out your hero’s own fears from “dead men’s fears”. It’s a very peculiar thing that the hero may be seeking a life continuation and life realization from a character no longer amongst him/her in that precise identity.

Out of nobility and grief, the hero takes on the burdens of those who have laid down their burdens. This includes pets. There may be one dead character or half a dozen. One dead pet or two or three. List briefly the goals of each dead person your hero has loved. Then briefly list the goals of each pet.

You may have wept doing this, remembering your own loss. If so, come up to present time. Now recall the last fun time you had in the fullest detail. Be very precise in trying to re-experience this good time.

Better?

Let’s see now if you can create the following for each person and pet you may have listed for your hero.

1. The precise moment your hero first decided they had affection for them. Then any moment they decided they had affection for them.
2. Any moment they decided they were like them. Now, the first moment your hero decided you were like them.
3. Any time your hero regretted something they had done to themselves. The first time your hero regretted something they had done to themselves.

With this much background failure the world has been in apathy about the body. It was born, it grew, and it died. Surgery and drugs could stem the tide of time a brief moment. But that was all. This dramatic struggle for knowledge of the human body was a struggle against time. Time’s scythe in the hands of that grim gentleman, Death, won every contest.

Now and then a mystic would rise in the world and with a few passes of the hand cause the crippled, the sightless, the faltering to bloom with life once more. Then the mystic, the adept, the master would vanish and Man would struggle on with attention to their relics but without many repetitions of the miracles.

That faith or thought could do such astonishing things in the hands of a master or adept brought men like Freud into heavy ambition to resolve the human body’s ills by resolving the ills of the mind. The medical profession of his day ostracized Freud. Today psychoanalysis and psychologists speak with contempt of Freud—perhaps they owe him too much. But Freud is the grand old man of psychosomatic healing. He popularized the idea that something could be done about human unhappiness via treatment of the mind and that human ills might be handled by handling the “ego”, the “id” and the other mental entities Freud thought he had discovered. Freud had many pupils Jung, Adler and others who decided only they themselves could see the light and so went sailing off into further and further incredibles. Of all these it now seems evident that Freud himself was the only one of them who had even started toward the straight and narrow road to complete physical rehabilitation of the body via the human mind.

The hero’s identity is the composite of all their experience, PLUS an initial decision TO BE and occasional decisions NOT TO BE. The hero doesn’t die as an identity or heroality or an individual. There is a family line, then, from generation to generation, modified by your hero as experience. They are not necessarily part of that family line. Every child, for instance, distrusts his identity as a family member. And there are numerous cases of record where a child, up to the age of three or five, recalled entirely who he had been in a past life—but forgot it under the pummeling of his “imagination” by adults. Perhaps your hero will take off after some lifetime and go to heaven. Nobody can argue successfully about that. But your hero is the source of themselves with regard to various generations. Now this becomes so irrefutable, so clear and unmistakable that if it can be disproven, then the laws of heat and fission can be disproven as well. We are on solid ground about immortality and all the rest of it for the first time in history.

Your hero is evidently quite eternal as a heroal identity. They get snarled up in the modern social aberrations about only living once and play the game as though they would never get another chance—which they will get at the self-revelation as certainly as the sun will rise tomorrow.

Now if they can handle a body in construction as a superhero, they can certainly modify one in growth and form, as in the superhero stories such as Superman, Batman and the X-men. And so does your hero. You can modify it to the degree of going blind or getting arthritis and being bed-ridden or having migraines or putting any other imperfection on them. Your hero, as CAUSE, is continually shouldering the ills of the world and modifying themselves accordingly.

Once having taken on such an ill to “help” another, they may be very reluctant to give up the infirmity. Evidently it doesn’t help the other very much but your hero, with their social aberration that a hero lives only once and never again, take the illness or demise of another very seriously. Much too seriously. Remember Bruce Wayne’s parents were gunned down by the Joker when he was a petty thief, causing Bruce to become Batman. As Bruce, in his latter life, became emotionally close to Alfred, the butler, who has arthritis, and if dies, and so there he is with Alfred’s arthritis. Of course, it isn’t his. It’s an old injury of his own—which he is holding in place for him. Characters will give up any illness or infirmity which is theirs—their very own—with immediate ease and no qualms. But they are quite tenacious of the ills they have shouldered for others. This caused old workers in the field of the mind to suppose that people simply refused to get well. No, character simply refuses to give up the illness of others for whom they have made themselves responsible, until they clearly see that holding the illness will not bring back or restore the health of that other. It’s a wonderful world. Man has condemned Man for selfishness for eons and here we find Man only gets lastingly crippled or lame to “help” another.

Once it was said that if a character knew the world was going to end tomorrow, the phone lines of the world would be jammed with calls from characters seeking to say they loved one another. It is probably quite true.

In the field of illness, however, once one realizes how little it helps, one can give up another’s aches and pains and resume his own health. It is quite a decision. You may find that your hero will be trying to make that decision. For example, a totally blind man making that decision could make the abrupt realization that he would see wholly and clearly for the first time in years. Just an instant before his sight turns on, he balks. Why? His trouble with sight had to do with the death of his brother. His brother had been injured and was blinded in an automobile accident. The moment the brother died, this character had taken on the burdens of his brother.

1. Now list 10 things which your hero wishes they could attain in the tomorrows, such as physical beauty, of strength, whether you think they can attain them or not. Get as wild as you like.
2. Now let’s be critical. List five things which you think may be wrong with your hero’s present physical being. List them with the thought that they might be remedied. Such things as frequent colds, etc.
3. Now list the 3 characters or pets that have failed or are dead who had things wrong with them. There may be more than one with each. Take the first error you listed above as number one and write the name of the character who might have had that ill after number one below and so on. You may not be able to account for some of your hero’s conditions.