This article proposes a brief psychological and psychoanalytical analysis of movie Black Swan produced in 2010 and released in 2011.

The film is directed by Darren Aronofsky, the same director as Requiem for a Dream, and the script is credited to Mark Heyman and John J. McLaughlin. The cast includes Natalie Portman, Mila Kunis, Vincent Cassel, and Winona Ryder.

Nina (Natalie Portman) is a ballerina who is obsessed with dance. When Beth MacIntyre (Winona Ryder), the prima ballerina of the ballet company, is about to retire, Nina is chosen as the principal ballerina in "Swan Lake". Nina's competitor is another ballerina, Lilly (Mila Kunis): they set themselves up as rivals. This confrontation between the two ballerinas (Nina andLilly) turns into a twisted friendship, and Nina's dark side begins to show.

The film Black Swan is an opportunity to reflect on several themes, such as: obsession, paranoia, (auto)aggressiveness, the double, the other, and the constitution of the subject in/from the family from the Freudian and Winnicottian perspectives.

Table of Contents

• Psychoanalytical ideas from the film Black Swan
  • Between pleasure and reality
  • The double and ambivalence in the film Black Swan
  • Otherness and sadomasochism
  • Projection and introjection
  • A battle between superego and id in Black Swan
  • Nina's ego split
  • The Intrusive Mother
  • Neurosis, psychosis and perversion
  • Birth and Death as Integrative Tasks
  • Life and death drive in the film Black Swan
  • Reality or illusion in the Black Swan scenes?
  • Nina is more than "a ballerina" in Black Swan

Psychoanalytical ideas from the film Black Swan

We will not work on a scene-by-scene summary of the film, but some ideas that will help you see the film with different eyes.

Between pleasure and reality

There is no way not to mention the work Pleasure Principle and Reality Principle (Sigmund Freud).There is present in the film an idea of a conflict between the dimension of the id that drives towards pleasure and the immediate satisfaction of desire, versus the demands of reality, especially in the obligations imposed by Nina's mother.

The double and ambivalence in the film Black Swan

The theme of the double The film deals with these themes of the double in the opposition between the white swan and the black swan. The film brings up the impossibility of purity. The subject is divided: it is an unstable position that is stabilized in the relationship with others and with the largely unconscious affirmations of his psyche.

White and Black as opposite sides of a personality coexist in Nina's human psyche. ambivalence That is, the coexistence of opposite feelings, such as love and hate, pleasure and obligation, living and dying.

Otherness and sadomasochism

In the same way as the double, the theme of alterity What we hate in the other may be signaling our desire: that is why Nina may be closer to Lilly, and the white swan can no longer live without its double, its other: the black swan.

There is so much the other that aggressiveness Nina is at first against her rival (Lilly), but then becomes self-aggressiveness This is a sign from the film that it is often not so easy to differentiate between what is "me" and what is "other".

This coexistence with the other is not harmonious. Because there is ambivalence: love and hate coexist. In this sense, we see in Black Swan movie the recurrence of sado-masochistic themes in the coexistence between characters.

O SM is a form of paraphilia or perversion that exemplifies ambivalence: the coexistence of pleasure/pain extremes. Instead of the common sense that pleasure is opposed to pain, sadism, masochism and sadomasochism conceive that pleasure is only possible with pain .

Projection and introjection

The other exists not only in interpersonal relationships, but also exists within the psyche of a subject. The ideas that constitute Nina are made from the others in her coexistence. Thus, we can say that there is a complementarity between:

• A projection of the mother in Nina: the mother wants Nina to be her (the mother); in fact, better than her. Nina is a chance for her mother to redeem herself from her frustrations for not having been she (the mother) an outstanding dancer. The mother projects in Nina this actualization: to make present the frustrated impossibility of the past.
• A introjection The introjection can be explained in the film as the internalization of the other's discourse. But, as we will see, this acceptance will be painful to the ego, which will force a rupture.

A battle between superego and id in Black Swan

Nina's ego must cope with Nina's demands for perfection superego These demands are represented by her mother's "model" and by the impositions of the ballet company director, who is a kind of father figure, since Nina's father is not represented in the film.

On the other hand, there are the demands from id There is this "other" inside Nina: marked by the unconscious side of the drives of the id that resists giving in to the demands of others.

Nina's ego split

The ego cannot negotiate a simultaneous satisfaction to id drives and the ideas of the superego This split can be understood as a breakdown of the ego. There are no identity mechanisms of the ego that can answer more precisely "who am I?" Thus, extreme possibilities would be the pictures of paranoia and hallucination demonstrated by Nina in the film Black Swan, conditions that would mark a picture of psychosis.

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The Intrusive Mother

A intrusive mother is psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott's name for what is also called "excess mothering". Nina's mother represents an intrusion, a desire for the daughter to live the mother's life. The ideal of the perfect mother manifests itself as an intrusive mother. For Winnicott, this is harmful to the baby, by creating a dome that does not allow the baby to have "challenges" that facilitate the functions of:

• integration : "to be whole, to know the bodily and psychic parts that compose him";
• customization : "knowing who he is, as opposed to what others are"; and
• realization : "knowing what external reality is, integrating with it, and modifying it".

Nina's mother is intrusive, perfect, perfectionist, what (today) is often called a narcissistic mother.

For Winnicott, the good enough mother would be a middle ground between the perfect/intrusive mother and the neglectful mother.

Neurosis, psychosis and perversion

These are the three psychic structures, according to Freud. Although it is said that each person possibly has a predominance of one of these structures, it is possible for the same subject to be permeated by more than one structure. This is how it is with Nina:

• Neurosis : marked by Nina's obsession with perfection and her "search for a dream", which is to a large extent her mother's dream, a superego ideal or a social demand that begins to be perceived by Nina as a mechanization of her existence.
• Perversion : as they can, Nina's id drives extravasate themselves in the form of sado-masochistic relationships, begin to shatter the ideal of perfection and show that the dimension of pleasure can no longer be repressed by Nina.
• Psychosis Nina's ego is pushed more and more toward the satisfaction of the superego, with insufficient "crumbs" for the id; this ego can no longer meet the psychic demands of these extremes (superego and id), and this extends to the ego itself. From the split ego, schizophrenia and paranoia, usually recognized as psychotic disorders, erupt.

Birth and Death as Integrative Tasks

Still for Winnicott, there are integrative tasks that mark the development of the psyche. The first of these tasks would be birth; the last would be death. So, death is a "healthy" part of the being's development. It is an act that will mark the end of psychic life, an outcome that the human being (unlike other animals) knows he will face.

Life and death drive in the film Black Swan

Before you think of the idea of death drive as negative, it is necessary to understand how Freud saw this theme. In short, we can say that:

• Pulse of life This represents a state of excitement and enchantment with life that leads us to search for risks, new sensations, and new responsibilities.
• Death Pulse : it is the impulse for "not being", the impulse to avoid pain, to have a psychic apparatus without resistances (in the sense of Physics), without "heats".

For those who understand binary computer code A good metaphor would be that the life drive is 1 (one) and the death drive is 0 (zero).

Another way to understand is from the famous phrase "To be or not to be: that is the question" (Hamlet, by Shakespeare) In this sentence, the "question" asked can be understood in these terms: "Life drive or death drive: which one to choose?

Many times in the same day, we live with these two impulses. For example, when we like to be with a person (life drive), or when we want to sleep to forget the tribulations of the day (death drive). The serious risk is when the death drive is extreme to the point of a definitive "zero" (like a serious depression that leads to suicide), or an extreme life drive that leads to the "one".definitive (such as a manic condition that takes the person out of reality, a megalomania for example).

Reality or illusion in the Black Swan scenes?

Some scenes in the film Black Swan (such as the sex scenes and involvement between Nina and Lilly and the death scenes at the end of the film) open up discussion: did this really happen? Or was it just the character's picture of paranoia and hallucination?

It is difficult to close with an answer. This technique of leaving in the air whether it is reality or illusion is a typical feature of cinema. And it is an allegory of the seventh art itself, by the way: after all, cinema is an illusion (a lie) but full of materiality (real, in the sense of having an existence and its production being "visible").

Requiem for a Dream In Black Swan, on the other hand, this doubt is provoked by the picture of the psychic instances in Nina's mind (ego, id, and superego).

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What we can say is that a film is not "transparent", it is not only a medium. It also has its own language. That is, the film itself "is" something. Therefore, even when we analyze a film through the lens what is psychoanalysis To do so is to instrumentalize the specifics of the artistic and of a work.

After all, there is also (and mainly) a dimension of filmic language, in its narrative, fictional, and synesthetic aspects (image and sound).

Nina is more than "a ballerina" in Black Swan

The option in Black Swan of "leaving in the air" the doubt whether a scene has occurred is a way for the film to put us in Nina's shoes: in a picture of paranoia, hallucination, and even in the extreme of an obsessive neurosis it can be equally difficult to know how to negotiate with reality.

Also, it is a way for the film to dethrone us from a place of supposed-knowing, frustrating the viewer's narcissistic desire to know everything. On the contrary, the film invites us to put ourselves in Nina's place, which is also a way of putting us in the place of the ambiguous and the impossibility of reducing the human to just one definition.

In the same way, Nina could not be reduced to just "a dancer": her human dimension did not admit being enclosed in the exclusive perfection of a craft. Rather, the film shows us that a human being cannot be reduced to "one perfection", because he is a superposition of multiple imperfections.

This article about Black Swan movie was written by Paulo Vieira In the members' area, our students have access to film analyses from our series "Cinema & Psychoanalysis". Among the videos, it is possible to see the live recording with professor and psychoanalyst Carlos Lima in which the film Black Swan was analyzed.