The movie version of the play, "A Raisin in the Sun" by Lorraine Vivian Hansberry, communicates the lifelong struggle of maintaining the legacies of family morals and values. The movie recounts the life of a black family’s struggle to honor their individual dreams. It displays the difficulties of maintaining homeostasis and bringing their dreams to fruition, simultaneously. The interactive patterns and the affects of reciprocal determinisms on the family are the major themes of the play. As the play begins a husband, Walter Younger, and wife, Ruth, are having an argument over Walter's dream to become an entrepreneur by buying into a liquor store. His plan is to use an arriving insurance check for his mother, Lena, as down payment on this venture. Walter tells his wife that, "I'm trying to talk to you 'bout myself and all you can say is eat them eggs and go to work". The transactional patterns of this argument are the first sign of the redundancy principal. Walter's feelings, that no one in the family listens to him or respects his judgment, are reiterated throughout the movie. From Walter’s perspective, if his family would trust in his vision, and allow his dreams to become reality, his family would prosper and homeostasis would be maintained. Following this argument, Walter goes off to his job as a chauffeur, a job he finds demeaning. Walter would rather "be Mr. Arnold [his employer] than be his chauffeur.”This Intrapsychic moment, illustrates a recurring motivation behind Walter’s epistemology that causes his conflict throughout the story. Walter begins to obsess the arrival of Mama’s check and the approaching possibility of his dream becoming a reality. He is now the identified patient. Walter’s psychopathology is affecting every member of the family in a pattern of circular causality. As his dream becomes larger-than-life, he changes--becoming oblivious to all but the arrival of his oppor...
