Black Swan Dissected - What Was Nina's Mental Makeup?

*Warning: This will contain spoilers

What exactly was the 'mental makeup' of Black Swan ingenue Nina? Natalie Portman recently diagnosed Nina in Empire magazine as having: “…definitely obsessive-compulsive disorder, anorexia, bulimnia, narcissistic personality disorder. She’s probably bipolar.”

One doesn’t want to argue with a Harvard psych grad!

People often confuse schizophrenia (which literally means ‘split mind’) and Dissociative Identity Disorder (aka Multiple Personality Disorder). To put it simply, schizophrenics have one personality but experience psychotic episodes, while people with DID have multiple 'alters' which they flip between with no recall.

To diagnose Nina, we need to explore her character behaviour throughout the movie.

Nina lives and acts like a child, in a pink girlish bedroom filled with toys, stuck in a pre-adolescent state of sexual repression. Throughout the movie, we see her move into a more adolescent state of sexual liberation and identity, as well as a rebellion typical of that stage. She is, in a sense, finally 'growing up'.

The father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, introduced the stages of psychosexual development theory, positing that conflicts between biological drives and social expectations during childhood later shape personality. Those who experience excessive or deficient amounts of gratification at a particular stage develop a fixation on that period and, when stressed, are likely to regress to that stage. You could thus say Nina is in almost a forced regression to her teenage 'genital' stage, which revolves around the sexual impulses of the genitals.

Academic symbolisms of death and sexuality are commonplace in horror films, specifically correlating death with loss of virginity. Symbolically, this shows the natural passage from childhood to adulthood, and the subsequent 'death' of life as was known. This is most prominently seen in the movie when romantic interest Lily is killed as Nina morphs into the character of the Black Swan.

The genital stage regression introduced in psychosexual developmental theory parallels developmental psychologist Erik Erikson’s corresponding psychosocial stage of 'identity versus identity confusion', wherein the adolescent forms basic ideas of self. The ambiguous and often dualistic concept of identity is constantly reinforced during the movie through a number of devices, including the use of mirrors.

While attempting to formulate her identity, Nina actively covets desired attributes of other dancers. She steals objects of Beth’s to try and capture her brilliance; she has a fantasized sexual experience with Lily to gain her sensuality. We know Nina’s murder of Lily is a hallucination, a symbolic ‘joining’ of her white (chaste) and black (sexual) personas. We can theorise, then, that Lily is a real person and additionally, Nina’s sexual alternate personality.

Therefore, we can also consider that Beth is both a real person and another of Nina’s alters; this time, looking at the repressed, maladaptive aspect of Nina’s personality crucial to the emergence of the Black Swan. Beth’s disfigurement, death and later haunting of Nina can be hallucinations similar to the death of Lily, representing the ‘joining’ of Nina to her darkside. Or, Beth’s disfigurement could be a trigger to the later hallucination of Beth, which triggers Nina’s total immersion of selves.

If Nina is showing signs of alter personalities, blackouts, and hallucinations, would we diagnose her as schizophrenic or DID?

She appears to experience some positive and negative symptoms of schizophrenia and potentially inappropriate affect. These symptoms fit with the schizophrenic subtype of paranoid schizophrenia wherein there are prominent delusions, primarily auditory, and hallucinations. While Nina does experience delusions of persecution and grandiose delusions, they are visual not auditory.

Bipolar 1 disorder is similar to schizophrenia, as both illnesses feature psychotic episodes. If Nina is experiencing a manic episode, she would produce many of the behaviours seen in the film, such as increased energy, decreased sleep, substance abuse, aggressive behaviours, increased sexual drive and psychosis, including delusions and hallucinations.

Alternatively, a diagnosis of DID requires a person to have two separate personalities which have different modes of being, thinking, feeling and acting that exist independently of each other. DID is associated with symptoms such as hallucination, self-abusive behaviour and dissociative symptoms such as amnesia and depersonalization. The sociocognitive model of DID suggests that an onset of DID can be the result of learning to enact social roles. If Nina is DID, she is definitely sociocognitive, and her split alters are a result of her coming to terms with her sexuality.

Problematically for a diagnosis of DID , Nina’s alters do not take over her core persona. She verbally and physically interacts with them, later incorporating them into her self.

We therefore can class Nina as:

• Either a paranoid schizophrenic, or suffering from bipolar disorder

• An obsessive-compulsive (because of her extreme perfectionism, preoccupation with detail/routine and devotion to work)

• An anorexic

I actually disagree with Portman's diagnosis of bulimia as we never see Nina binge-eating. I'm similarly not sure about Nina being a narcissist as she seems extremely insecure, and overtly admires/copies personal attributs of other individuals that she wishes to possess. A classic narcissist has an entitled and inflated self-worth, believing themselves to be better than the majority of society

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#Psychological #Thriller #Dance