Psychological analysis
of the Gu Lidan Shen Heyong
Abstract: The movie "Beautiful Mind" is a psychological blockbuster familiar to domestic audiences. The actor Nas is a typical schizophrenic patient. This paper makes a psychological analysis of Nas from the performance of Nas in the film, and reveals the psychological reasons of Nas's schizophrenia from the perspective of analytical psychology, so as to help the audience better understand the film and the mentally ill.
Key words: Nas emotional unconscious archetype
Even now, when people talk about schizophrenia, the usual reaction is still to feel fear, incredible and rejection, discrimination, it is difficult for normal people living in real society and ordinary life Understand the weird behavior and behavior of psychopaths. However, in our society, there are more and more mentally ill people. They need not only the attention of doctors and psychologists, but also the recognition and support of the public. And the most recent film, A Beautiful Mind, undoubtedly succeeds in doing so.
"A Beautiful Mind" screenwriter Akiva? Goldzman made careful arrangements for the plot, and the actor Russell Crowe, who played the actor Nas, also performed superbly. There is also the beautiful campus of Princeton in golden autumn, the calm and ethereal music, and the overlapping shots, all of which make "A Beautiful Mind" a delicate and beautiful film, and won four Oscars in one fell swoop. However, what is really impressive are Nas's wonderful thoughts and legendary experiences in the movie, and what really touches people's hearts is the touching love brought by Alisha, which is the human nature that Nas has experienced in his life. beauty.
Akiva? Goldzman's parents are well-known New York psychiatrist, he himself has a good understanding of mental patients. In this sense, Goldzman was the first psychoanalyst of the "Nas" archetype, and both film and psychoanalysis were trying to tell a story, trying to penetrate a person's heart. Goldzman's psychoanalysis makes Nas's mind reproduced on the screen realistically and deeply, and we hope to help ourselves and the audience to better understand the film and Nass through some psychoanalytical viewpoints mind.
1. Personality Analysis: The Conflict of Thinking and Emotion
(1) The imbalance of thinking and emotion
"Beautiful Mind" shows a genius thought. Nas initially gave the audience the impression that at the welcome reception at Princeton University, in Nas's eyes, the sunlight floated in the air through the glass and the image of the lemon, and then just coincided with the tie pattern of a student next to him. Nas smiled and said to the classmate, "You know what? I can explain mathematically how ugly your tie is." This is Nas, the genius of West Virginia, in whose mind mathematics seemed to explain everything. He observes everything in life and expresses everything in life with mathematical formulas and mathematical reasoning. Rugby games, the cycle of pigeons, the behavior of a woman chasing a man for her purse, etc., his famous game theory was inspired by observations of the social activities of men and women in bars. Through the window full of formulas, one can see Nas's thoughtful face, the world in his eyes is a rational world full of numbers, logic and reasoning, and he is tirelessly pursuing in the rational world as he understands.
Contrary to his pursuits in the mathematical world, he has little enthusiasm for real life. The beginning of the film also expresses Nas's personality through some clips. He is withdrawn by nature, does not speak much, refuses to socialize, and is out of tune with the lives of other classmates. Undoubtedly, Nas' mental and emotional development was very uneven.
When the psychoanalyst master Jung talked about mental types, he regarded thinking, emotion, feeling, and intuition as the four poles of the functional cross, the center of which is the self. In which thinking and emotion are opposite, feeling and intuition are opposite. The ego can be biased in both these opposite dimensions. People who like thinking have their own willpower directed towards the thinking end, and emotions can only be placed at the lower end and have a secondary function. When the two are relatively balanced, the ego can still better understand and control emotion, and the emotion at this time is a rational emotion. But the more accustomed a person is to thinking, the more easily emotions are rejected. Emotions can only function in the unconscious when thinking takes over the whole of consciousness. Emotions cannot be understood and controlled by consciousness because they are rejected, and they often lose their rationality and become irrational emotions. So Nas is not afraid of being attacked by others on his mind, because that is what he can consciously and control, but he is afraid of emotion from the unconscious, which is the realm he cannot understand and control. In the film, we can feel that the complex conflicts in Nass's heart are hidden under his dull expression, success and failure, loneliness and recognition, love and result...
(2) Three irrational emotions
Fear of failure: He is afraid of failure, refuses to fail, and cannot accept failure. There is a scene in the movie where his rival Hanson challenges him to a chess game. Hansen said: "Are you afraid?" Nas said confidently: "I am afraid, very afraid, but the one who is afraid is you." However, when Nas lost the game, he was stunned and could not accept the fact. And said, "You shouldn't have won. The chess I played first was flawless. It must be flawed." Nas stood up nervously, and knocked over the chessboard in a panic. Later, when he talked about it with his imaginary roommate, he was still brooding: "I lost to a self-righteous guy, I had the initiative, but I didn't know how to do it and lost it, it must be him A ghost in the dark." In the film, we can also see a lot of Nas' anxiety when he is afraid of failure. When he did not write a recognized paper, he felt deeply frustrated and slammed into the full On the glass window of the complex formula, he said bitterly, "I can only think of so much." Nas pursued success and honor, and his emotions were deeply occupied by this desire.
The helplessness of isolation: Although Nas has superhuman intelligence, he is a lonely genius. When he first entered the campus, he walked up the stairs alone, holding a long shadow behind him, it was a lonely figure. Several times in the film he talks about his opinion of others. "I don't like people very much, and people don't like me very much," he said the first time he chatted with the imaginary Charles. His mentor, Hellinger, told him, "You may be largely isolated from the world. It affects your academic development. Interaction between people will bring us a new vision." Nas said, "I don't make friends because I'm a dumb ass." In the dialogue, Patcher also said: "I like to be alone, and more importantly, people don't like me." In fact, it can be seen from the film that the environment in Princeton is quite tolerant to Nas. Nas thinks people don't like him it's just that he "dislikes people" in his heart a projection. His isolation isolates his emotional connection with others, and especially when the environment creates stress, it can easily translate into a state of hostility to the environment, thereby increasing his anxiety. But he also needed recognition, and when he saw many teachers in the dining room laying their pens in front of an old professor in reverence, his eyes filled with longing.
Lost in love: It can be said that Nas does not pay attention to the feelings between people. He not only disdains the exchanges between classmates, but also has no interest in the feelings between men and women at first. An amusing shot is of classmates in a school bar urging Nas to chase a girl. He came to the girl, looked at her calmly and said, "I don't know what I should say if I want to have sex with you, but can you just pretend that I have said those words? I mean it's not as good as us. Forget those opening lines and get to the point." Nas didn't believe in adult romance, so he played a prank on the girl. Here, Nas sees only the purpose and result of intercourse between men and women, seeing it as a completely objective and emotionless process. From this detail we can also see that his emotions are rejected by rational consciousness.
From the above analysis, we can see that Nas' personality and psychological experience, thinking and emotion, consciousness and unconsciousness are very unbalanced. He is troubled by irrational emotions, which is the reason for his schizophrenia. Those psychological elements that he rejects, disdains and resists, those unrecognized emotions can only be expressed in abnormal ways. 2. Symptom Analysis: Unconscious
Intrusion and Ego Loss These three hallucinations all originate from Nas's unconsciousness and are pathological manifestations of the unconscious compensation function. The unconscious includes all mental experiences that are not conscious and are part of our personality. For normal people, the unconscious often acts as a supplement to consciousness through desires or motivations that are opposite to the conscious tendencies. For example, dreams in daily life are a manifestation of the unconscious's compensatory function. People with unbalanced mental development are often victims of the imbalance between consciousness and unconsciousness. They struggle with their own unconsciousness, and the normal compensation function of the unconsciousness can only be manifested in abnormal forms.
The contents of the unconscious mainly include individual unconsciousness and collective unconsciousness, and collective unconsciousness is the deepest level of the mind. It contains many common human experiences. In analyzing the dreams, symptoms, or hallucinations of normal and mentally ill people, we can often touch upon this archetype of the collective unconscious. Archetypes are the staple of the collective unconscious. There are various archetypal modes, including almost all human psychological experience, but the most important archetypes in the unconscious are mainly the hero (the ideal self in the character), the shadow (the opposite of the character), the anima or the animus (the opposite sex image). ), the wise old man (intuition that inspires wisdom), the Self (integrity of character), the Holy Child (prediction of new birth), etc. Archetypes are often expressed through imagery.
(2) Three archetypes
Through the analysis of Nas' personality above, we know that in Nas' mind, the emotions ignored and rejected by consciousness are in an unconscious state, and those unconscious conflicts with consciousness are concentrated in three aspects The irrational emotions of , originate from three archetypes and are expressed by three characters. They perform their compensatory functions uncontrollably as they invade Nas' world of consciousness.
Roommate Charles - Shadow
According to the doctor's analysis, Nas may have started schizophrenia when he was in graduate school. He had already constructed a roommate Charles in his fantasy by then. Charles' personality is the exact opposite of Nas's, focusing on the characteristics of Nas's surrounding classmates who don't fit in with Nas. Many aspects of Charles' personality are precisely what Nass has denied. He is the shadow of Nas. Charles first appeared in the film as the prodigal son. In stark contrast to Nas's restrained expression at the time. When Nas talked about his fascination with mathematics, Charles said: "Mathematics doesn't bring truth, you know why? Because he's so boring." When Nas talked about his dissertation, Charles asked He: "How long has it been since you dated?" But unlike other classmates, Nas was recognized by Charles, who always thought he was a genius and encouraged him all the time. Nas, who is lonely in his heart, undoubtedly needs this kind of recognition and encouragement, so Charles is also the embodiment of Nas' need to be recognized in loneliness.
Department of Defense Officer Patcher--hero archetype
Everyone wants to be successful, and there is a sense of heroism in every culture. This is our deep psychological need. But for Nas, this deep psychological need is manifested through hallucinations. Nas had already achieved some fame when the first appearance of the Patcher hallucination, and had successfully cracked the code at the Pentagon. But for a person who cannot accept failure, the greater the success, the greater the fear of failure. He needs more fulfillment to ease his subconscious anxiety about failure. Patcher makes Nas feel like a hero because their "project" touches the lives of 150,000 people. related to the safety of the country. Participating in such a work is Nas's deepest ideal and desire.
The little girl Matthew - the prototype of Anima
The little girl Matthew is innocent and cute, and has never grown up. He is Nas's inner female experience. The clip of Nas being slapped in the bar for disrespecting women's feelings shows Nas' inexperience with women and not paying due attention to women's emotions. His female experience is weak and immature. When he began to meet and be attracted to his future wife, Alicia, he began to fantasize about Matthew, and that is the time when he talked about Alisha with the hallucinating Charles, with a happy face on his face expression. He said: "He is so charming, I am overwhelmed." "Should I marry her?"
(3) Spiritual split
Nas's inflated emotional needs are the gaps through which the unconscious invades and controls consciousness. After the unconsciousness that Nas ignored was manifested through fantasy, Nas' personality was gradually divided. The archetypes of the unconscious have formed a self. They are independent of each other and often replace the real world in Nas' mind. For the mentally ill, when these split selves often conflict with the normal self, the original real self will gradually lose courage and ability, so that the patient is completely controlled by the fantasy world. In the film, when Nas feels danger and expresses his unwillingness to continue working, he is threatened by Patcher and compromises again and again. For him, those hallucinations were real. When he was taken to a mental hospital and told he was sick, he didn't believe it and thought it was a Soviet conspiracy. And when Alyssa went to visit him and presented them with the materials he had compiled himself, he still couldn't accept the reality. But inside, he believed in Alyssa. At this time, his fantasy world began to be impacted. The contradiction between the "reality" in his mind and the reality in reality made Nas very painful. He dug his wrist to find the diode that could emit numbers. After that, he received electroshock therapy. "Right now he's going through the most difficult stage of being a schizophrenic, the fear of not knowing what's true and what's false..." Dr. Rosen said. 3. The Mystery of Rehabilitation
: The Contest between Rational Emotions and Irrational Emotions
(1) True and False
But Nas miraculously recovered without insisting on medical treatment, which is the power of love. Alyssa's love is the bridge between Nas' unconscious and consciousness, and the bridge between Nas's contact with reality.
To heal a patient who has lost the ability to distinguish between real and fake, the most important thing is to bring his attention to reality. Nas is lucky that he has always had the support of Alyssa Love. Nas has always felt Alyssa's love and believed in Alyssa's love. When he was confused between true and false, at least he knew that Alyssa's love was real. It is this real emotion that allows the real world to re-enter Nas' consciousness, making Nas re-focus on the real world under the guidance of real emotion.
The climax of the film is that Nas's mental illness relapses and Patcher's life is threatened. Alyssa called the doctor to inform the doctor, and Patcher ordered Nas: "You must stop her." Nas, nervous about his wife's safety, quickly said: "Don't involve her in it", when Patcher took out a gun and pointed at her. As he confronted Alyssa, Nas rushed over and slammed his gun to the ground. When Alyssa rushed out, Nas was under pressure from several hallucinations at the same time, and Patcher pointed a gun at him and said with a stern face: "Kill her!" "Either she or you!". Charles ran downstairs and said, "Oh, John, do as he says." Marsh took his hand and looked at him as if to make a decision. All the voices and images swirled in Nas's head, and finally he ran out to block Alicia who was leaving, and said excitedly: "Matthew can't be real, she never grew up." That moment , precisely because of his unwillingness to hurt Alyssa, precisely because of his love for Alyssa, his reason overcomes the illusion, his ego becomes strong in that moment and controls the irrational hallucinations.
(2) Rational emotion and irrational emotion
When Nas is really aroused and truly feels the power of rational emotion, he can gradually get rid of the control of irrational emotion. Because at this time, emotion is no longer a blank in Nas' consciousness, it can be accepted and understood by consciousness, and become the driving force of self.
In the film, there is a touching dialogue when Alicia decides whether to let Nas return to the hospital. Alisha takes Nas's hand tremblingly and puts it on his face, and then on her own face, "You. Knowing what's real, this, this," and put Nas' hand on her heart, "and this, they're all real." Alicia looked into his eyes and put his hand on In his heart, he said sincerely: "Maybe here, I believe that some powerful forces are entirely possible." Nas's tears finally flowed down with a whimper.
Alyssa believes that Nas's heart can feel her true love, and she believes that Nas's true feelings are powerful enough to allow Nass to overcome the hallucinations and regain his lost self. With this belief, she helped Nas begin the difficult journey of fighting against hallucinations and reuniting with a divided self. Alyssa encouraged Nas to return to work on campus, an environment that helped Nas stay in touch with reality and turn his attention to day-to-day affairs. He confronted the hallucinations, and whenever Patcher's hallucinations reappeared, he yelled out, "You're not real, you're not real." Although Nas was seen as a weirdo from time to time, the power of his ego had Gradually became stronger and eventually controlled his hallucinations.
Decades of battling mental illness have given Nas a deeper understanding of life. When he chatted with Thomas King, a member of the Nobel Foundation who came to visit him, he exclaimed: "Poetic beauty is not human nature." : "I hardly believe in data, logic, rationality, but I keep pursuing it. I ask myself what is logic and who defines rationality. My questions make me spin in the physical world. The most important thing in life is that I have the love of my life, if there is any reason, it is because of you, my love, you are all my motivation!" The
film gave us a profound revelation that modern society attaches great importance to technology and rationality In the world of thinking, we often ignore emotions. But Nas's life experience shows that only the beauty of thought is not the beauty of true human nature. Only good emotions can make the mind and the soul merge, and can build a unified and beautiful soul. This is something we should think deeply about.
References:
1. The Theory and Practice of Analytical Psychology, written by Jung (translated by Cheng Qiong and Wang Zuohong), Sanlian Publishing House, 1997
2. Sylvia Nasar. The Man Behind a Beautiful Mind. Newsweek, March, 2002, P52
3. Vadan Mehta. Russell's Nash. Film Review. August 2002
4. Donald Williams. Notes on Character, Dreams, Filmmaking, and Fiction. Film Review, January 2001
5. CG Jung. A Criticism of Bleuler's Theory of Schizophrenic Negativism. Collected Works of CG Jung, Vol. 3. Princeton University Press, 1972 303p. (p. 197-202)
6. CG Jung. On the Importance of the Unconscious in Psychopathology. Collected Works of CG Jung, Vol. 3. Princeton University Press, 1972. 303p. (p. 203-210)
7 . CG Jung. Mental Disease and the Psyche. Collected Works of CG Jung, Vol. 3. Princeton University Press, 1972. 303p. (p.226 -230)
Psychoanalysis for Nash in the Film "A Beautiful Mind"
Gu Lidan Shen Heyong
(South China, Normal University, Guangzhou, 510631)
Abstrct:"A Beautiful Mind" is a popular movie which perfectly show the inner world of a schizophrenic. This paper intends to help people understand the film and the disease of schizophrenia better through psychoanalysis for the protagonist "Nash" in the film.
Key Words : Nash Emotion unconscious Archetype
About the author:
Gu Lidan, female, 1979.6, 2001-level postgraduate student, Department of Psychology, South China Normal University
Shen Heyong, 1959.12, Professor, doctoral supervisor, Department of Psychology, South China Normal University
Article source: Chinese psychotherapist
View more about A Beautiful Mind reviews
