Adam B. Clark
First Quarter Essay
October 7th, 2008
Amanda and the Human Condition

In “What the Bleep Do We Know?”, Amanda goes from being in a constant stae of transference in her life, to accepting all of the beautiful things around her through a mere change in the way she thinks about things and releasing the transference she used to have. The transformation that Amanda goes through is very similar to that of the prisoner in Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave.”

Amanda is plagued with odd occurrences that she tries to label as anxiety, so she takes pills to try and block these things from her thoughts. She dreams of Indians unable to see the mayflower as it approached although they could see the ripples in the water that the boat cause. She also sees all of the emotions of people as little colored objects that act out the certain emotion. Amanda is upset that she is assigned to take pictures at a wedding because of the experience that she had when she had her very own wedding. Because of Amanda’s bias about weddings, she is unable to see the beauty of the two people getting married and falsely accuses the groom of cheating on his wife at the wedding. Amanda compares to the prisoner in Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave”, because both of the two characters have a biased opinion on what is reality and what is not. The prisoner believes that the shadows on the wall are the objects that make the noise, even though it is the people crossing on the bridge. Amanda refuses to believe in the things like men because of a bad experience, causing her to not know the truth about all men. After the wedding, Amanda views herself as fat and repeatedly yells that she hates what she is looking at in the mirror.

When Amanda meets the man in the subway station, she refuses to understand what he means when he says “If thoughts can do that to water, imagine what thoughts could do to us.” At the height of Amanda’s emotional breakdown, Amanda looks at the water dripping from her bathroom sink and remembers what the man from the subway said to her. She then begins to understand that the thoughts that go on in our mind are what control our actions, moods, and self-images. Amanda’s self image has a complete 180 degree turn, going from covering up her own image in the mirror with toothpaste to accepting her body and drawing hearts all over her arms, chest, and legs. Amanda is a good example of what Peck calls transference, as she releases her “outmoded view of reality.”