Introduction
This paper¹ seeks to analyze Darren Aronofsky’s film “Black Swan” (2010) through the concepts of Carl Gustav Jung’s Analytical Psychology. Its aim is to illustrate the principal archetypes of the psyche, as understood in Jungian Psychology, through the film’s characters and moments.
The celebrated Italian author Italo Calvino defines a classic as a work that, on first encounter, seems to have been seen many times before and, after becoming deeply familiar, still surprises us as it did the first time (SCHUTT 2013). We might suggest that this happens because of these works’ mastery in engaging what is both familiar and unknown within each of us: our archetypal material. The German fairy tale attributed to E. T. A. Hoffmann, “The Black Swan,” the ballet it inspired, Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake,” and the film’s self-referential treatment of staging that ballet all seem to merit Calvino’s praise (PEREIRA 2011).
The film’s main character, Nina, is a young ballerina who dreams of stardom and seems to be the most dedicated dancer in her company. She strives to secure the principal role in “Swan Lake” but struggles to perform the black swan.
Development
Nina Sayers, played by the well-known actress Natalie Portman, is a lonely, naive ballerina who fulfills her mother’s wishes and dreams down to the smallest detail. The daughter seems to be a continuation of her mother’s life and body: her bedroom door does not close, and she has no privacy. Her mother, meanwhile, spends most of her time painting pictures of her daughter, whose facial features blend with her own. Nina wears white throughout the film and is both literally a virgin and virginal in attitude.
Nina’s mother, Erica, is a retired ballerina. She seems to have fallen in love with someone and become pregnant with Nina, interrupting her career—or at least she believes so, although she was already twenty-eight when this happened. Always dressed in black, she is aggressive, frustrated, and controlling. Apart from her paintings, she concerns herself only with her daughter’s ballet career. This mother has idealized her daughter’s life as the fulfillment and continuation of her own: a perfect daughter. She does not allow Nina to do anything outside her plans.
Steeped in her mother’s anxiety, Nina also worries about her age and longs for the moment when she will become a star in the New York ballet company where she dances. At the same time, she seems to have little contact with unconscious life, which demands attention. She appears to rebel against her mother’s control through her own body: she scratches and cuts herself compulsively and unconsciously, and bleeds spontaneously on her back and at her fingernails and toenails, as if taking out on herself the hatred she feels for her extension, her mother, whom she does not permit herself to hate.
Nina encounters Thomas Leroy, the company’s director. He recognizes that she has the technical perfection and delicacy to perform the white swan but lacks the seductiveness, creativity, and sensuality needed for the black swan. She is full of technique and conscious effort but lacks contact with her own body as a woman. He therefore tells her to set technique aside and challenges her to experience her sexuality.
Nina also meets Lily, the company’s new dancer. Her complete opposite, Lily always wears dark colors and has little technique but abundant seductiveness and creativity, attracting Thomas’s attention. Nina has a love–hate relationship with her. During a night out, they are mistaken for sisters; the next day, however, Nina almost loses the role to Lily because she arrives late and Lily does not. Lily seems to personify the seductive sister in the ballet who tries to steal the prince’s love from its principal character.
According to the Dicionário de Nomes Próprios (NINA 2017), Nina means girl, gracious. It is used as a diminutive of names such as Antonina or Ana, the latter meaning gracious in Hebrew. In Spanish, it may represent a diminutive of the word “girl.” The word recalls the Portuguese verb “ninar,” to lull to sleep. In Italian, “ninna” refers to a child’s sleep (NINAR 2017).
In the film, Nina truly is “mommy’s little girl,” gracious, with a dormant femininity. All this negative, masculine energy from her mother has prevented her from allowing herself to mature and encounter her own Animus, perceived as violating and dangerous. Erica’s distrust of the director is one example: when her daughter begins acting independently, she reprimands her. As in Withimont (2000), Nina is trapped by archetypal impulses of adaptation to external reality and the collective—her Persona. She lives the character idealized by her mother: “in childhood, our roles are determined by parental expectations” in order to receive approval.
Yet growth is known to require the symbolic “death of the parents.” The Ego must differentiate itself from the Persona for the person to become conscious of themselves. Unable to escape this trap alone because of maternal power, Nina falls into a “pseudo-ego”: a stereotyped experience of herself in which she is only the ballerina-daughter. This formation is both rigid and fragile and, under internal pressures, may border on psychosis (Withimont 2000, p. 140). We see Nina hallucinate, perceiving herself dressed in black and with a more aggressive manner. These visions, interwoven with scenes of reality, show a shadow version of Nina struggling to emerge or control her. Withimont also tells us that when the Persona does not separate from the Ego, it is as though clothing cannot be removed from the skin, and psychosomatic skin symptoms sometimes appear: clinical experience coinciding with the film’s fantasy.
The director Thomas—Tomé in Portuguese—acts like the apostle: he wants to see in order to believe. Somewhere between perceptiveness and perversity, he uses seduction to awaken Nina to her Animus. According to Hopcke (2012, pp. 104–107), the Animus for Jung is the archetype representing a woman’s masculine counterpart, generally poorly developed. Despite this inferior nature, Jung held that the contrasexual archetypes should guide the Ego in its knowledge of inner life. In her idealization of Thomas, Nina seems to project her Animus onto him. This is an inferior, projected experience of her own archetype, yet within the film’s plot it seems to guide her through the process of separating from the Persona. In doing so, she confronts her Shadow.
This happens in Nina’s relationship with Lily, onto whom she projects and in whom she perceives her shadow side. Lily possesses what the protagonist lacks, or what lacks room to emerge: seductiveness, creativity, and cleverness. She is Nina’s friend and seduces her, yet also tries to steal her role and seduces both the director and Nina’s partner in the ballet. While threatening Nina, or seeming to control her, she also helps her experience her body and pleasure as an emancipated woman.
In Jung’s view (1986), the Shadow:
“constitutes a moral problem that challenges the ego-personality as a whole, for no one can become conscious of this reality without expending moral energy. Becoming conscious of the shadow means recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as they actually exist. This act is the indispensable basis for any kind of self-knowledge and, as a rule, encounters considerable resistance. (…) These traits have an emotional nature, a certain autonomy, and are therefore obsessive—or rather, possessive—in character” (pp. 6–7).
The name Lily itself speaks of the shadow aspect. Although in Portuguese it simply means the flower, a lily, etymologically it would be a diminutive of Lilian or Lilith (LILY 2017). Lilith means “of the night” in Akkadian; in Assyrian mythology she represented certain demons, and in Jewish tradition she is Adam’s first wife, supposedly replaced by Eve because she would not submit to him, falling from Eden with her children, the evil spirits (LILITH 2017).
In striving to perfect her performance, Nina is obliged to work with all her sides so that both swans can be well portrayed. Life, through synchronicity, compels her to encounter her Shadow: in the effects of winning the principal role and the group’s aggression that comes with it; within herself, in bodily symptoms and visions; in projections onto Lily or Beth, the veteran ballerina replaced by Nina; in the small thefts she commits in Beth’s dressing room; and even in encountering an old man masturbating on the subway.
As opening night approaches, the visions and skin symptoms intensify. Nina fears Lily, her understudy. Yet Thomas tells her that the only person standing between her and success is herself—or, more precisely, we might say, her Shadow. And this is what seems to happen.
Possessing a weak Ego, Nina, under the pressures of the premiere and competition, hallucinates a physical fight with Lily, seems to undergo a breakdown during the performance, and kills herself. Before this, she also seemed to be losing weight and avoiding food, which could indicate an eating disorder. The ballet’s ending makes the character’s death coincide with the ballerina’s, both by suicide, following a beautiful performance.
Conclusion
Although we may see Nina as a psychiatric patient, it seems more fruitful to view the film, like the original tale, as a metaphor for the development of the psyche.
Every individual needs contact with their Shadow to mature psychically and free themselves from the bonds of the Ego ideal, projected by the parents and embodied by the Persona. This becomes more pronounced in adolescence, alongside sexual development and the “death of the parents”: Nina seems to break her mother’s hand to keep her from entering her room.
When this process is delayed or prevented, the psyche pressures the Ego through images and synchronistic situations, so that these contents neglected by consciousness can be assimilated.
The Ego, however, experiences this process as mutilating and threatening to its life—and indeed it is: this pressure will destroy the personality as it presently exists, forcing the Ego out of its sphere of control and comfort. The Ego experiences this as a car accident, as happens to Beth, suddenly propelled by an unknown force and losing its sovereignty and control of the situation.
Faced with the force field of the objective psyche, however, the Ego can do little. In the struggle between the conscious Ego and the partial personalities demanding integration, the latter prevail: in somatizations, dreams and nightmares, coincidental events, and the suffering they cause, capable of bringing patients into therapy offices.
To her surprise, Nina realizes that the person she killed was not Lily but herself. Here we have the assimilation of the Shadow: characteristics attributed to others are recognized as her own, although initially unwelcome.
When the Ego accepts the process, a death really does occur: the mirror breaks, along with the image she had of herself. The suffering involved in encountering the Shadow is dangerous but liberating, releasing considerable energy that had been repressed.
As in the original tale recounted by Thomas during rehearsals, death is the only option, and the princess gives herself over to it because it is her liberation: a more conscious and flexible individual may emerge anew. The princess leaves the swan’s body and is freed. This resembles the death brought by the snake to the Little Prince, in the work of that name—the end of the eternal Puer. In the process of individuation, the individual draws closer to what they hold as their becoming, their essence. The skin of the Persona is torn by the black swan of the Shadow. Nina says: it was perfect—which etymologically means “fully made, complete.” The being has moved closer to wholeness, to the Self, in the process of individuation. The Ego has yielded its place to the Self, the central organizing archetype of the psyche.
References
HOPCKE, Robert H. Guia para a obra completa de CG Jung. 3ª ed. Petrópolis: Vozes. 2012.
JUNG, Carl Gustav. Aion: estudos sobre o simbolismo do si-mesmo. 2ª ed. Editora Vozes, 1986.
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SCHUTT, Diego. 5 definições sobre livros clássicos de Italo Calvino. Ficção em Tópicos. May 23, 2013. Available at: < http://ficcao.emtopicos.com/2013/05/livros-classicos/>. Accessed June 23, 2017.
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Footnotes
1 Paper presented in the postgraduate program in Analytical Psychology, UNIFENAS (2017). Academic supervisor: Professor Alessandro Caldonazzo Gomes – CRP 04/9244. Jungian concepts (archetypes) were capitalized solely for stylistic reasons.