MOSES’ ANXIETY AND DEFENSE MECHANISM IN EXODUS: GODS AND KINGS MOVIE

Abstract

Anxiety is part of the defense mechanism. Defense mechanisms are psychological strategies unconsciously used to defend a person from anxiety arising from unacceptable thoughts or feelings. This study found the types of Moses’ anxiety and investigate the defense mechanism that Moses employed in reducing his anxiety by employing Freud’s concept as the main theory. The design of this research was qualitative research with content analysis as its approach. As the data, this study employed words including narrations and dialogues that were taken from Exodus Gods and Kings’ movie script. This study showed that Moses character experienced three types of anxieties covering neurotic anxiety, moral anxiety, and realistic anxiety. Furthermore, Moses employed five types of the defense mechanism covering repression, formation, isolation, denial, and aggression. The conclusion of this research considered Moses character experienced neurotic anxiety when he identified a boy that represented as the authority figure who was punishing him. The moral anxiety experienced in four times, overall happened when he felt guilty and realistic anxiety experienced three times because he managed some threats from the outer world. Moreover, all these features of the defense mechanism used to cope with Moses’s anxious feeling. The implication of this research provided another point of view in seeing Exodus: Gods and Kings' movie as the portrayal of the way how people can't suffer anxiety easily because anxious feeling happened from many factors and how people tried to use the defense mechanism to reduce anxiety.