A great deal of the therapy that Will undergoes is psychoanalytic and rightly so. He is a perfect example of what influence childhood experiences have on the development of an adult personality. Although his unconscious conflicts are not overtly psychosexual, they are certainly traumatic and confusing enough to shape a person's later self. Will describes his abuse at the hands of his foster father in great detail while in therapy with Sean. He claims that his foster father used to lay out a stick, a belt, and a wrench and allow Will to choose the implement he would be beaten with. This practice of having the victim choose their instrument of punishment could force them to subconsciously accept the notion that they are deserving of punishment and are thereby punishing themselves. Interestingly, Will would choose the wrench, the hardest and heaviest object, as a show of defiance towards the abuse he was receiving. Freudians would likely see this pseudo-masochistic behavior as an id/superego conflict; the id impulse would be to resist and fight back but superego constructs say that the older man is the authority figure that is to be respected. This conflict forced young Will to accept his punishment, but exercise some id impulse by voluntarily taking the hardest abuse. To cope with this serious internal turmoil Will's conscious became encased by Freudian defense mechanisms. He is stubborn and overly aggressive with little self control. He often picks fights and insults those who are trying to help him, especially the series of therapists he met before meeting Sean. However, this behavior only persists when dealing with men with whom he is not fully acquainted; he is sweet to and protective of women that he meets as well as of his close friends. For example, while visiting a Harvard bar Chuckie flirts with some female Harvard students. He is subsequently accosted by a male student named Clark who thinks it is funny to belittle Chuckie's intelligence in front of the women. Will steps in and outmatches Clark intellectually, afterwards also offering to "step outside and figure it out". These examples could be seen as Will trying to subconsciously assert dominance over other male figures who are attempting to display authority; a direct correlation to what he was unable to do to his foster father as a child. Will also uses displacement and projection as defense mechanisms. When his girlfriend, Schuylar, presses to know about his past and family, Will becomes enraged and violent. He blames Schuylar for asking too much of him and claims that she only wanted to be with him in the first place to be able to say that she "went slummin' too once". He makes her extremely upset and finally leaves her, all to protect himself from having to relive and re-tell the stories of his abuse. However, the defense mechanism that Will seems to employ most is repression. Although the memories of his abuse are clear and he is able to recall them, he is reluctant to speak of them and has also isolated himself from those memories emotionally. It is not until he has developed a very strong relationship with Sean that he is able to open up to and realize those feelings, urged on by Sean's repeated mantra of, "it's not your fault." Will not only struggles with the aftermath of his abuse; he is also tormented by his own genius. Nearly as prominent as his use of repression is his use of reaction formation. Will's superior intellect makes it difficult for him to hold what he would consider to be normal relationships. As a result he works as a janitor and does not display any desire to use his genius to his advantage. He desperately wants to be a "normal" guy, but inside is consumed by his boundless intelligence. Still, his will to form his personality according to working class constructs is persistent and strong. When Sean and Prof. Lambeau set him up with job interviews at prestigious institutions he often did not attend or insulted the people working there and the jobs they performed. He did everything in his power not to get hired, claiming that he would rather lay brick or be a shepherd. He holds a degree of self-loathing, quite probably rooted in the fact that he feels his intelligence is an unrequested burden that makes people think of him differently when all he wants to do is blend in to the crowd. On a more positive note, it could be argued that Will also presents a prime example of sublimation. During his years of abuse and neglect, the only solace he found was in learning new things; he told Sean that some of his best friends were Shakespeare, Frost, and Locke. If reading and learning were his escape from the realization of his abuse it could be considered a positive sublimation of a very negative series of events.