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The Personality of Nina Sayers in Black Swan: A Psychoanalytic Overview

Mrigaanka Rajagopalan

Sigmund Freud’s theory of personality is one of the most well-known theories in the field of psychology. He theorized that a person’s behavior results from the interaction of three key components of the personality that he called the id, ego, and superego. (Butcher et al., 2020) Black Swan, directed by Darren Aronofsky in 2010 starring Natalie Portman, is one of the many movies that artistically portray this theory. Natalie Portman was particularly praised for her portrayal of Nina Sayers, a professional ballet dancer, who is preparing for her role in the play Swan Lake. Nina Sayers is a very complex and layered character and the film beautifully portrays the conflict between the id, ego, and the superego through her.

Nina Sayers is a 28-year-old professional ballet dancer who still lives with her mother. Erica Sayers, Nina’s mother, was herself a professional ballerina whose career came to an end because she was pregnant with Nina. She tries to live out her glory days through Nina. She is unable to separate herself from Nina as sees them as a single unit. She sees Nina’s successes and failures as their successes and failures. Her mother prepared breakfast for her, dressed her up, and always wanted to know about her whereabouts. She controlled every action of Nina’s life leaving absolutely no autonomy to Nina. Erica’s behavior could be described as narcissistic which is aligned to the parameters of the DSM-5. (DSM-IV and DSM-5 Criteria for the Personality Disorders)

Freud viewed the superego as introjected parental authority setting boundaries to the ego. He stated that there were different pathological configurations of the superego; one of which was when there was too much idealization (narcissism). (Weiss, 2020) The narcissistic parent instills in their children an overly judgmental superego, resulting in a conflict between what the child wants to be and the ego ideal, which makes them feel unworthy if they don't live up to it. (Rizthia, 2021) This led to Nina’s superego to be dominant and to be repressive of her id.

The superego is the moral branch of personality and is guided by moralistic and idealistic principles. (Butcher et al., 2020) This strong superego has been expressed throughout the first half of the film: from wearing mainly white clothes which symbolize innocence and purity to her strong need to be perfect. She can also be seen to have hurt herself from scratching her back repeatedly which shows compulsive behavior. In psychoanalysis, compulsive behavior arises when people are attempting to resolve secret, taboo impulses while working within the limits of cultural norms and external reality. These desires are internalized into the unconscious, where they eventually manifest as an uncontrollable desire to participate in irrational action. (Csigó, 2021)

The main plot of the story is how Nina desires to get the lead role in the play Swan Queen. Although she is perfect for the white swan who is supposed to be pure and innocent symbolizing the strong superego of Nina, she is struggling to portray the black swan who is supposed to be seductive and manipulative which is symbolic of her repressed id. Id is the primitive and chaotic part among the three parts of human personality. The id operates based on the pleasure principle by which the id functions to avoid pain and maximize pleasure. (Butcher et al., 2020) Her director Thomas Leroy pushes her out of her comfort zone to try to act more like the black swan but she seems too frigid and unable to let go. We can see the conflict between the superego and the id.

This conflict between the superego and the id is shown through the hallucination Nina has throughout the movie. According to Freud, hallucinations occur when people experience heavy stress on the unconscious, forcing them into consciousness. When people have hallucinations, their thoughts, which are inextricably linked to suppressed or unconsciously remembered experiences, can morph into images. (Freud, 2010) Nina is so stressed that she has hallucinations about seeing something that is not real. She sees feathers protruding out of her body, hears paintings, and imagines her peers to be laughing at her. 

  As the movie progresses and she tries to emulate the persona of the black swan one can see a visible shift in her behavior. She starts defying her mother and goes out at night with Lily, a colleague of hers, consumes drugs and seeks sexual pleasure. Thus, letting go and allowing her id to be expressed. The movie shows the contrast by showing her to be wearing darker clothes as opposed to white or pink and her hallucinations showing her to be physically transforming into the black swan. 

This movie fails to find a resolution for the imbalance between her id, ego, and superego leading to violent expressions of her id which resulted in Nina accidentally stabbing herself and ultimately losing her life. However, even though she was on the verge of her death her stress transforms into happiness as her desire to be the black swan was satisfied.


References

Butcher, J. N., Nock, M., & Hooley, J. M. (2020). ABNORMAL PSYCHOLOGY GLOBAL EDITION. PEARSON ACADEMIC.

Csigó, K. (2021). Obsessive position: the new psychoanalytic approach of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Current Psychology. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12144-021-01893-3#:~:text=Freud%20considered%20OCD%20to%20be,an%20earlier%20stage%20of%20development.

DSM-IV and DSM-5 Criteria for the Personality Disorders. (n.d.). NYU. Retrieved February 6, 2022, from https://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/courses/materials/Narc.Pers.DSM.pdf

Freud, S. (2010). The Interpretation of Dreams: The Complete and Definitive Text (J. Strachey, Ed.; J. Strachey, Trans.). Basic Books.

Rizthia, R. A. A. (2021). The Id Domination Over Nina Sayers' Ego as Seen in Her Characteristics in Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan Movie.

Weiss, H. (2020). A brief history of the super-ego with an introduction to three papers. The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 101(4). https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00207578.2020.1796073

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