Psychological Disorders In The Black Swan

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The Black Swan is a dark movie that portrays a young, innocent woman by the name of Nina Sayer who is sheltered by her mother, who gave up her career as a dancer in order to raise her. Nina is a dedicated and hardworking dancer who spends a lot of time trying to perfect every move. However, her sexually aggressive ballet instructor reprimands her for being such a perfectionist and accuses her of a lacking a true passion for dance. When Nina is selected to play the role of the Swan Queen in the Swan Lake recital, she is ecstatic that her time and dedication has paid off. As time passed, she quickly let the role consume her life and she spiraled into many different cases of psychological disorders due to an unhealthy amount of stress. Nina faced several challenges while preparing for the big role. Her …show more content…

At several points in the film, Nina is distraught by a lesion on her upper back. It becomes apparent that the dancer has a history of severe scratching which lead to these lesions. The constant skin picking and scratching is likely an automatic response to high levels of anxiety and is a temporary fix to release emotional distress (Vanier). The lesions on her back appear throughout the movie and signal her growing anxiety. However, the unconscious nature of it does not become apparent until Nina awakens with mittens on her hands that her mother put on since the scratching had become so intense while she was sleeping. Her desire to be perfect and the pressure she receives from her mother and ballet instructor are possible factors for why Nina developed a form of OCD (Vanier). Throughout the movie, the symptoms of OCD are expressed with very strong visual images in order to fit the dramatic mood, but this could lead to incorrect information regarding OCD. The dramatized symptoms may influence the public to learn the wrong image or only associate OCD with uncontrollable skin

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