Kramer Vs. Kramer & Christian Marriage

Kramer vs. Kramer

The movie Kramer vs. Kramer takes place in Manhattan and revolves around a family of three; Joanna, Ted, and Billy. Ted Kramer is a workaholic who has a career in advertising, as an executive while Joanna, Ted's wife, is a housewife whose main priority is to care for their young son, Billy. Just as Ted receives the good news that he has been assigned a new, very important account, he returns home to tell his wife, only to find that she has made up her mind and is in the process of leaving him due to his neglect towards their family. Leaving Ted to the new responsibility of caring for their son, Billy, the movie tells a story of how the divorce impacts everyone involved and how the exchange of roles between husband and wife has allowed for Ted to change his view on life and become a better father figure in order to repair the relationship he has with his son.

In referring to Erik Erikson's "Eight Stages of Epigenesis", Ted Kramer would fall into adulthood at this point in his life in the movie. In the stage of adulthood in one's life, a person faces the psychological crises of generativity versus self-absorption. In other words, the person struggles to either choose between caring for the people around him or her, or simply focusing on one's own individual needs and wants. The significant relationships in this stage of the life cycle tend to be with a significant other, ideally marriage, where two partners share a household, start a family, and divide the labor and responsibility of maintaining the household and family between themselves. The psychological tasks for an adult is to make and provide all of the necessities of life and take care of himself and his family in order to live in the most fulfilled way at that stage in life. Ted, however, as a husband and father, fails to meet these qualities at first, as he is more focused on himself and his career rather than his wife and child, and provides only financial support for his family. The responsibilities of his household are unevenly distributed, as his wife takes on most of the tasks of caring for her family other than contribution to income. One of the man reasons why Joanna sought to divorce Ted was because she needed to "find herself" as an individual, something that she has not been able to do during their entire marriage because she was forced to take on both the maternal and paternal roles in the household. Later on in the movie however, as Ted is forced to be the sole provider and caretaker of Billy, he learns to shift is priorities from self-absorption to generativity. Through trial and error, Ted learns how to sufficiently care for his son by dedicating more of his energy towards his family than his work, which finally results in him losing his high-powered job and assuming a lower-income position. By the end of the movie, it is evident that Ted evolves into the person