Phoebe's ChildhoodPhoebe Buffay, often displaying properties of childlike innocence while maintaining an eccentric, street smart appearance, has a personality that stems from her childhood. She never experienced a complete childhood, as her mother committed suicide, forcing her to live on the streets at age 14. Karen Horney's psychoanalytic social theory is built on the assumption that social and cultural conditions, especially childhood experiences, are largely responsible for shaping personality. According to this, Phoebe's childhood forced her to be self-sufficient at a young age. Even more so, she starts out in the physiological stage of Maslow's Humanistic Hierarchy of Needs as she had to fulfill the need for food and shelter. She never attended high school or college, but managed to learn French and some Italian. During her time on the streets, she encountered various wild experiences that always manage to shock her friends, such as stabbing a cop and boxing at a YMCA. Although the dark themes of her past were often played for laughs, Phoebe's journey over the ten seasons were devoted to the exploration of her past, as she spent most of her time looking for the family she was born into. According to Freud's defense mechanisms, Phoebe displays signs of regression as childish behavior is a prominent part of her character. It is known that Phoebe still believed in Santa Claus, up until Joey tells her otherwise, and she never had a bicycle of her own until Ross bought one for her and taught her how to ride it.
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Her Beliefs Throughout the series, she tries to use her traumatic past to gain sympathy from her friends, often referencing her mother's suicide. However, with the amount of death, discomfort, and abandonment she had to endure, she looked to her friends for comfort as they were the most important people in her life. Her selflessness is exhibited when she was a surrogate for her brother's children because it would make Frank and his wife happy. She worked as a masseuse who refused to allow herself to work for large corporate massage chains. Phoebe is wholeheartedly held down by her beliefs such as reincarnation and vegetarianism, her openness to the existence of paranormal phenomena, and her refusal to believe in gravity and evolution. Alfred Adler would see her bizarre behavior as an overcompensation.
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