Freudian and Jungian psychology are generally on the wane, and the ideas espoused by these two systems of psychological thought have for decades been declared as outdated in most quarters, most especially by the scientific establishment. “Freud looms largest on that rearward horizon,” A. C. Grayling has said, “perhaps because his theories are more focused, are rooted in the ever-intriguing matter of sex, and come packaged in compelling narratives of strange human experiences.” In his assessment of Jung, however, Grayling is less than flattering. “Jung’s more diffuse and unwieldy theories did not have quite the same potency,” and even though he concedes that Freud “is thought by many now to be off (scientifically speaking) with the fairies,” Grayling still prefers him because, “at least, [Freud] was an empiricist and rationalist” who lacked and disdained what Grayling sees as “Jung’s excesses.”[i]
However, despite such negative verdicts, both Sigmund Freud (1856 – 1939) and Carl Gustav Jung (1875 – 1961) are still surrounded by fealty and praise from avid adherents and sometimes from unexpected sources. In a recent series of Terry Lectures (annual lectures on religion in the light of science and philosophy), Marilynne Robinson has paid homage to Freud, going as far as to assert that he is a genius who was misunderstood by both his contemporary culture and ours, and arguing that we are still to fully engage and understand his message.[ii] As for Jung’s legacy: it is maintained in hubs of disparate activities (analytical psychology, esoteric circles, alchemical studies, art and religion, mainly) and it is not exactly clear what will become of it. There was a revival of interest in his ideas with the recent publication of his secret but long awaited (and very beautiful) Red Book, but that spark has not generated any significant or ongoing interest in his output beyond the confines of the Jungian coterie.[iii] Nevertheless, even in the face of this general disregard, terms such as 'ego,' 'self,' ‘individuation,’ ‘unconscious’, ‘sub-conscious’, ‘dream analysis’, and 'uncanny' became and remain part of our day-to-day vocabulary largely thanks to the attention these two men gave to them. Our attempts to expand our still limited understanding of these phenomena remain heavily influenced by their joint but at times divergent systems of interpretation. Clearly, although the influence of these two men on our cultural landscape is already vast, there is a possibility that it is still due to reach its peak; if they are retreating they are doing so gradually. The steady sway of their ideas on contemporary culture is nowhere more evident than in Darren Aronofsky’s latest film, Black Swan (2010).
Black Swan tells the story of Nina Sayers (played by Natalie Portman), a psychologically fragile young woman who is cast as the Swan Queen in the season’s production ofTychaikovsky’s ballet Swan Lake. The ballet revolves around the tale of Princess Odette who has been turned into a White Swan by a sorcerer’s curse. In Act 3 of the ballet, the dancer who plays the part of Odette also has to play the Black Swan, Odile, who is Odette’s darker counterpart and who competes with her for the Prince’s affections. Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel), the director of this New York ballet company, thinks Nina’s vulnerability and perfected skills as a dancer make her an ideal ballerina to play the White Swan but finds her too frigid, sexually, to convincingly dance the Black Swan. Rehearsal after rehearsal, Leroy is unimpressed by Nina’s performance despite her enormous efforts to “loosen up.” He just doesn’t find her sensual and seductive enough to be Odile. His roving eye begins to notice and focus on Lily (Mila Kunis), whom he evaluates as being less skilled as a dancer but more in touch with her feminine sensuality (“Now watch the way she moves”, he instructs Nina, “Sensual. She’s not faking it”), and eventually decides to make her Nina’s alternative/understudy. Meanwhile, Nina’s world grows ever more nightmarish; as opening night draws nearer and nearer she finds herself losing hold of reality and experiencing body transformations that exacerbate her already unstable mental state. Other notable characters in the film are Beth Macintyre (Winona Ryder), the aging principal dancer who has to make way for the new and younger Swan Queen, and Erica Sayers (Barbara Hershey), Nina’s amateur artist mother who is overly involved in and protective of her daughter’s life and who, through her daughter’s ballet career, sees a chance to live out her own unrealised dreams of becoming a ballerina. The film was the opening night feature at the 67th Venice Film Festival, and has been one of the most popular films of 2010 with critics and audiences alike.
Aronofsky has made a name for himself for being a director of harrowing psychological films, and Black Swan is no exception. Who can forget the uncomfortable feelings evoked by Requiem for a Dream (2000), where the viewer is subjected to witnessing individuals descend into various versions of self-created psychological infernos, one only worse when compared to the other. The boundary between what is reality and what is imagined by the deranged minds is constantly questioned by the characters – though the viewers are constantly alert to the hallucinatory visions of these characters. We are sane, they are sometimes not; we have the privilege of knowing when they are and when they are not – they do not. Moreover, the source of their dysfunction is made manifestly clear: they are addicted to mind-altering pharmaceutical or recreational drugs. In Pi (1998), Aronofsky’s first film, we have a mad mathematician bent to a point of destruction on finding the formula for everything in the world. “I’m a broken down piece of meat,” Randy sagely laments to his daughter on his condition as a has-been wrestler trying to make a comeback in The Wrestler (2008). In all of his films, there is a generous dose of obsessive madness and mayhem, and the characters in the end are always destroyed and the viewer is left devastated. Or meant to be.
In Black Swan, again we have mayhem, madness and destruction, but this time it is the concentrated turmoil of one character and she is tormented by ‘forces’ seemingly outside of her control. Where in Requiem the external deterioration of characters has bearing on the ensuing unpalatable psychological upheaval (what is happening inside their heads is a result of what they are doing on the outside), in Black Swan the opposite impulse is operative: the character’s inner struggle is represented in external images or symbols of uncomfortable contortions (what we see happening outside is a representation or result of what is going on inside her head). In both films, the result is the same: what is real and what is delusion is always open for questioning and more so as the films progress to their breathtaking climaxes. Yet there is a crucial difference between these two films: in Requiem we are always sure that it is the characters who are ‘losing the plot’ whereas in Black Swan we just might be lost in it too and entirely; by the time the film reaches its climax we have abandoned our need for distinguishing ‘reality’ from non-reality and are totally absorbed in and transfixed by what is unfolding before us. But as I will show later, this peculiarity in Black Swan is what makes it a dazzling film even if at times an irrational and incoherent one.
Nina’s troubles centre on her coming to terms with her (mature, adult) Self and that Self’s relationship to sex and sexuality. This is a classic problem in Freudian and Jungian analytical psychology, and the film contains numerous undisguised references to the subject. To be sure, Black Swan is a product grounded much in our time, for despite its focus on the waning high culture of ballet or the ideas of Freud and Jung it is a film made with today’s sex-aware or sex-crazed young audience in mind. We might not care much for ballet – or Frued or Jung – but we do care enough about sex and definitely about Natalie Portman (who is very well cast). So let us talk about sex, then. Shortly after casting her as the Swan Queen and at a point where we think he will take advantage of her sexually, Leroy declines the chance to have sex with her but instructs her to go home and masturbate herself. This he hopes, we deduce, will loosen her up and start a process that helps her get in touch with what she is most disconnected from: her sexual self, and what eventually emerges as her Shadow Self. Nina, it seems, is a virgin, though the film never makes this explicitly clear. If not a virgin, then she’s definitely virginal. Her inexperience is betrayed by her obvious innocence that Leroy reads off her body. Lest the viewer remains in doubt then the film provides a short cut: she is constantly equated to a white swan.
White swans in Western culture are a symbol of womanhood at its purest, and in Western thought – at least in Tchaikovsky’s time – womanhood at its purest was necessarily virginal. In classical mythology the white swan was dedicated to Apollo, the god of music, and because it was also sacred to Venus it became “an image of naked woman, of chaste nudity and immaculate whiteness.”[iv] Together with supernatural female creatures such as sylphs, shades, and water nymphs, the white swan was the backbone of the fantasised ideal of pure femininity in this canon of symbols in numerous myths and legends (and in ballets, whose source material was mainly myths and legends). When not associated with femininity, the white swan represents innocence and purity as in Hans Christian Andersen’s The Wild Swans, a story about 11 pure-hearted brothers who are turned into white swans by their evil stepmother.
But as Nina’s explorations of her sexuality deepen, she comes face to face with the existence of her negative double, a personal demon that has been shaped by all the repressed and dark aspects of her personality, which Jung cautioned was able to trick, trip and destroy the individual if they dealt with carelessly. This side is represented by Nina turning into a black swan. A black swan, apart from being a rare scientific probability, is glaringly absent from Western myths and when it eventually appears it is bound to be associated with the macabre by virtue of its colour. At the beginning of the film, Nina tells her mother “I had the craziest dream last night, about a girl who was turned into a swan. But her prince falls for the wrong girl and she kills herself.” This is a very significant dream, obviously, in the context of this film. For Jung, myths and legends were the safest means through which an individual could access and deal with this dark persona, the Shadow (referred to as the doppelgänger, 'the double', in Freud's writing), and by accessing it through dreams it was possible to eventually and efficiently integrate it into a more stable relationship to the mature, whole Self. Nina is being offered a chance to integrate warring aspects of herself (her Persona and her Shadow; the White and Black Swans respectively) into one coherent Self, but throughout the film the Shadow threatens to overtake her.
The Shadow is a vague, menacing instinctual figure of the same sex, whom the (dreaming) personality does not recognise at first. Initially, it can appear as the opposite sex, and sometimes it can be felt to be standing behind the individual and difficult to see face to face. It is the unrealised, rejected aspect of the personality, containing all of the elements of the self that the personality has actively discouraged to develop and they may even be unaware of their existence. It is the individual’s worst side, the one that threatens everything about who they are at the moment of recognition. The Shadow is a sum of everything we wish we weren’t – but are. Any undertaking to thwart the emerging Shadow simply negates reality even further, and increases the dread and the pain that acceptance would have regulated or removed.
Nina’s mistakes in dealing with her Shadow are numerous. First, she ignores it and pretends it isn’t there even though it terrifies her. Failing this, she denies it, and instead projects it externally onto others: first onto an unknown man in the subway, then onto Leroy and eventually and most obsessively, onto Lily. Lily is someone Nina dislikes and fears, even though Nina envies and cannot ignore her because of the very things Nina finds frightening about her in the first place. She possesses the carefree and magnetic sensuality Nina so craves but lacks and is afraid and unable, because of her domineering mother’s presence, to pursue and attain. Failing this, she then accepts her Shadow too wholeheartedly, and allows it to devour her in scenes that lead to distorted realities. One moment she hates Lily so much she is convinced she is stalking her, the next she accepts her offer to go party all night – get drunk, take drugs and frolic in bed – despite the blatant disapproval of her mother. Then, as a last minute measure, and an unpremeditated volte-face, she convinces herself that Lily is out to replace and destroy her and, with Lily as the incarnation of her projected Shadow, attempts to rid herself of her by killing her. Black Swan, in a way, is a modern manual on how not to deal with the Shadow. If approached appropriately, Jung asserted that the Shadow can be a force for constructive forward movement (as it is clear in some of the scenes where Lily and Nina actually get along very well and bring out the best in each other), but if dealt with carelessly and harshly it is a formidable and vital enemy that can destroy the individual inside and out.
MAIN PHOTO: Niko Tavernise
[i] A. C. Grayling, The Heart of Things: Applying Philosophy to the 21st Century (2005; London: Phoenix) 
