A Psycho-Eulogy upon a Swan: Secondary Narcissism and Failed Maturation
How would and how even could a pursuit of perfection necessarily lead to self-immolation? Darren Aronofsky’s film Black Swan[1] provides an answer with a psychological thriller centered on Nina Sayers, a New York ballerina striving for perfection while under the oppressive care of her mother. Despite the multiplicity of doubles surrounding Nina, including Thomas, Lily, and Beth, the symbiosis between Nina and Erica remains the center of the heroine’s character formation— “Erica personifies every troubled relationship that Nina otherwise has: she is her idol (Beth), rival (Lily), and mentor (Thomas).”
[2] Grounded in Sigmund Freud’s 1914 essay, “On Narcissism: An Introduction,” this analysis draws on the Freudian distinctions between primary and secondary narcissism, ego-libido and object-libido. Nina’s journey from an infantilized dancer to an unhinged wreck could be seen as a quintessential case study of the fragile balance of libido and the potential catastrophic consequences thereof.
The essay will first establish the baseline state of the enforced primary narcissism within the mother-daughter relationship as a gilded cage that hinders the healthy maturation of Nina’s ego, and then trace her failed attempts at object-cathexis through probing her sexual exploration. It will be subsequently argued that the inward withdrawal of her frustrated libido induces perforce the emergence of her secondary narcissism and the specific psychotic symptoms therein.
美
The plot of Black Swan unfolds with a clear sense of beginning with a new season start for the ballet company, but the characters of it unfold in medias res. The psychological root of Nina’s collapse emerges and permeates long before the film’s events begin. Since the father is not mentioned throughout, it is safe to surmise that the root is located right in the suffocating and enmeshed relationship with her mother, Erica. Erica is presented as a tragic figure whose former ballerina career was curtailed due to the unexpected pregnancy with Nina. What has also been stagnated is her emotional status at the point of this perceived failure.
She thereafter projects all her unfulfilled ambitions onto the direct cause of the unfulfillment, Nina, who then becomes a vessel of all her desires. “The child shall fulfil those wishful dreams of the parents which they never carried out.” [3] Quite as such, Erica exemplifies a Freudian mother and parent whose love is “at bottom so childish” and “nothing but the parents’ narcissism born again.” [4] Specifically, Freud argues that this mentality propels the parents to “ascribe every perfection to the child. .. and to renew on his behalf the claims to privileges which were long ago given up by themselves.”
[5] Think about Erica’s obsessive micro-management of Nina’s body and work, her vicarious thrill out of Nina’s successes, her prolific and somewhat disturbing paintings of Nina. By no means are these expressions of object-love for a daughter, but a narcissistic cathexis of her own reborn self, rather, in other words, an attempt to achieve perfection through a proxy.
This parental manner seems to be born of love yet is profoundly damaging. Overprotection is just the appearance; what’s lurking beneath is the prevention, even if unconscious, of Nina from developing into a mature and independent subject with her own desires and the choices of objects thereof, which, in turn, would necessarily hurt the narcissism of Erica as an ultimate revealing confirmation of her long-lost youth and long-standing failure. Nina, thus, must be kept in a state of infantile dependency, orchestrated delicately in variety, epitomized by her bedroom configuration.
Aronofsky visually represents this enforced inseparability, though unrequited and one-sided for Erica, through the claustrophobic settings of Nina’s child-like bedroom. The mise-en-scène looks almost frozen in time with stuffed animals, butterfly wallpaper, a music box, etc. , all rendered in hues of pink and white that connote, in a way, a pre-sexual innocence. Erica’s actions reinforce this infantilization at every turn, too. She would rub Nina’s back, cut her fingernails, dress her, see her into bed, keep watch overnight, confirm her every outing, and take down the lock, and at one point, the whole doorknob.
This environment establishes Nina’s psychosis as nearly inevitable.
Within this context, Nina’s initial attachment to Erica cannot be classified as a true object-libido, for she lacks what Freud posits as “a unity comparable to the ego”[6] that can differentiate itself from an external object. And it is nothing else than the symbiosis Erica makes real that prevents this psychic unity from coming into shape. For Freud, all infants start with the state of auto eroticism in sexual development where they take pleasure in bodily functions and are not able to tell apart themselves and the world around.
Then, when a cohesive consciousness of self emerges, the child will necessarily rise into a stage known as primary narcissism, where throw all their love energy, that is, libido, into themselves, reinforcing self-esteem, in other words, “an original libidinal cathexis of the ego.” [7] Usually, in a healthy individual this ego-cathexis should eventually be sent out towards objects. However, in Nina’s case, her sexuality has been nurtured in a pathological way. She is capable of primary narcissistic ego-cathexis but not yet of object-cathexis.
Her libido is not directed towards her mother as a distinct object but is contained within an ego that remains psychically fused with her mother (n. b. , this symbiosis equals not the inability of differentiating self and the world, i. e. , auto-eroticism). Her constant seeking approval of Erica—think who she calls first after nominated as chief—is the desire of an undifferentiated self for validation from the narcissistic whole where it is still a part. At this point, she is vaguely aware herself of the predicament yet unable to make a definitive step to develop from self-love to object-love, and from ego-libido to object-libido.
She remains in a state of prolonged primary narcissism, a prolonged juvenile.
梦魇
Trapped within this narcissistic symbiosis, Nina’s psyche is driven by a fundamental imperative to break free, both biologically and psychologically. “[I]n the last resort we must begin to love in order not to fall ill, and we are bound to fall ill if, in consequence of frustration, we are unable to love.” [8] Poetically as Freud points out, object love should be a natural stage, so natural that if it finds itself constrained, it must incite pathological changes in the subject in order to break loose. In Nina’s trajectory, the artistic director Thomas’s command to “touch herself” serves as the catalyst for rebellion.
The subsequent masturbation scene represents her first significant attempt to direct her libido outwards. In fact, the significance of this moment is exactly underscored by its interruption when Nina notices Erica asleep yet watchful besides her bed. One could argue whether it’s her hallucination or not, yet nonetheless the scene holds connotation of conflict on a psychic level: a nascent object-libido struggling to emerge, only to be suppressed by the internal forces that maintain the primary narcissistic state.
As her outbound libido marches off, Nina’s choices are not guided by a healthy capacity for object-love but are instead dictated by the logic of her own narcissism. Freud outlines two fundamental types of object-choice in his essay: the anaclitic (or attachment) type, where one loves those who protect and feed like their caregivers early in life; and the narcissistic type, where one loves a reflection of the self. Nina’s choices, revealingly enough, fall exclusively into the latter category.
Lily, to start with, certainly is “what [she herself] would like to be”[9] under the narcissistic type of love-object for Nina. Lily embodies everything Nina’s repressed and rigid ego desperately wants yet lacks, the uninhibited freedom, sensuality, and artistic effortlessness as the black swan. Nina’s intense, psychedelic sexual encounter with Lily is therefore not an act of true object-love but a narcissistic fantasy of psychic incorporation. In other words, it could be seen as an attempt to consume and assimilate the idealized qualities she has projected onto her rival, to become the perfection she sees in her.
Frankly speaking, in reality, Lily may be much less ideal in character and less annoying: She turns out to be the one who fully unleashes Nina’s sexuality; despite all the provocations, she never poses any virtual threat on Nina’s position, especially considering that she quite agreeably and proactively complements Nina in the grande finale.
What’s more, when Nina takes the subway to the company for the first time in the film, she glances a woman exactly like her, and after she meets Lily in the ensuing scene, it logically comes to attention that Lily and the mystic lady on subway dress quite the same with one identical gray scarf, hinting that Lily might just be Nina’s hallucination of a perfected self, a devil in her personified.
Similarly, in Thomas Nina isn’t looking for a protective father figure as well. Rather, he is the referee of the game. He dictates what’s good and bad, what’s perfection and what not. He is an object chosen not merely for he’s her first sexual influence, but because of the authoritative position he’s in and thus the narcissistic function he/authority can serve.
These attempts at object-cathexis turn out to be catastrophically frustrated. Lily casually denies and even mocks a bit their one-night stand the next morning, shattering Nina’s fantasy; Thomas never treats her romantically, only providing conditional, perfection-oriented, and manipulative recognition. Both not reciprocating what she desires, the balance and economy of Nina’s libido is severely oscillated. The object-libido, having been sent out, is then left suspended, unable to attach and unable to be satisfied.
This psychically untenable state triggers the mechanism Freud describes: “the libido that has been withdrawn from the external world has been directed to the ego,” becoming “a magnification… of a condition which had already existed previously,”[10] namely primary narcissism. So, when her outward cathexes all meet their Waterloo, Nina could only invest more and more into her ego to rebalance the loss of the unrequited object-libido. This process becomes a regression to a primitive psychic state, now pathologically magnified into the Freudian secondary narcissism state.
This “damming-up of libido in the ego,”[11] as Freud terms it, is the direct engine of her psychosis, which explicates the piling up of hallucination (of Beth, Erica’s paintings, etc.) that culminates in that fatal (con)fusion of Lily and herself in the dressing room. As Nina growls against Lily/herself, “It’s my turn,” and whispers in her last gasp, “It was perfect,” it could then be parsed to link the “two fundamental characteristics” of schizophrenia: “megalomania and diversion of their interest from the external world.”
[12] This is her ego, engorged with withdrawn libido, experiencing the ultimate magnification of and meantime regression to the infantile feeling of omnipotence. She’s lost in secondary narcissism, so astray that there’s no way to go but forward.
童年照瞩目
To sum up, the film meticulously dramatizes a psychoanalytic sequence of events: a subject, held captive in a state of enforced primary narcissism by a mother’s own narcissistic needs, makes a desperate leap toward the external world. When her nascent attempts to cathect object-libido fail due to her narcissistic choice of objects in the first place, she then suffers a seismic regression into a secondary narcissism. Nina’s tragedy lies not in her failure but in her success.
One could say that her story is in essence a cautionary tale of a giant baby who, in her failed and violent attempt to be born into the world of maturity, ultimately returns to the inanimate state from which her psyche perhaps never truly departs.
摄影机隐身术
[1] Black Swan, directed by Darren Aronofsky (USA: Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2010), 108 min.
[2] Tarja Laine, “Chapter Five: The Uncanny Sublime,” in Bodies in Pain: Emotion and the Cinema of Darren Aronofsky (New York: Berghahn Books, 2015), 141.
[3] Sigmund Freud, “On Narcissism,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 14 (1914–1916) (London: Hogarth Press, 1957), 91.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid., 77.
[7] Ibid., 75.
[8] Ibid., 85
[9] Ibid., 90.
[10] Ibid., 75.
[11] Ibid., 85.
[12] Ibid., 74.