In "Black Swan," I was most compelled by the portrait of eating disorders, body image distortions, and archetypal co-mingling of the polaries: reality/illusion, light/dark, perfection/imperfection, and domineering stage/mothers/frightened little girls. I see these issues too often in dancers and young girls with eating disorders (Serlin, 2005). As a horrifying and beautiful film, it relies on painterly images to convey the mix of beauty and pain, white (White Swan, purity) black (Black Swan, darkness), and red (blood).
For example, Natalie Portman ("Nina") appears in most of the scenes, reflected in multiple mirrors and other faces. The confusion between fantasy and reality begins with her frightening mother, who as a frustrated former dancer seems to long for her daughter's destruction. Nina's love object is the archetypal Demon Lover; the charming, dangerous, and elusive director who pushes her from Apollonian control and precision to passion and dark Dionysian frenzy (Holden, p. 14). It is the young girl's poor body, ethereally thin and scarred with cutting, that is the canvas on which the awful story is shown and finds its denouement.
Therapeutically, using her creativity and nonverbal language skills, she could benefit from Dance/Movement Therapy (Serlin, 2010) in which she might be able to feel an authentic self and express that self in word and deed.
Patricia Holden, Marin County psychotherapist, noted:
"What I found most illuminating on the part of the director (and sometimes missed by therapists), is the characterization of eating disorders. At last, we see an eating disorder, not as a symptom of eating or fear of weight gain, but rather about anxiety. I found it important that the compulsion to purge was characterized as similar to the continuum of other symptoms (eg cutting, etc) used by a person to process overwhelming anxiety. And hopeful for treatment that addresses the anxiety issues and the environment that feeds this anxiety response, rather than the secondary approaches of nutrition and diet."
Therapies that can build on the body's symbolic expression of the splits in its psyche or that can address the existential anxiety of being overwhelmed by life might be a good fit to work with this situation. Studies evaluating their effectiveness should be encouraged.
References
Holden, S. (2011, January 2). The Prince and the uncommon commoner. The New York
Times, 16-17.
Serlin, I.A. (2005, May 18). Shall we dance? PsycCRITIQUES-Contemporary
Psychology: APA Review of Books, Vol. 50, No. 20.
Serlin, I.A. ( 2010 ). Dance/Movement Therapy. In I. Weiner and Craighead, W. E., The Corsini Encyclopedia of Psychology. New York: John Wiley and Sons. 459-460.
