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Essay about Black Swan

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The main character in the film Black Swan, twenty-eight year old female Nina Sayers, displays signs of numerous disorders through her abnormal behavior. Nina’s life is consumed by her occupation: professional ballerina/dancer. Nina resides with her mother and rarely socializes with others. She has difficulty concentrating, is restless, irritable, suffers from muscle tension, and sleep disturbances from nightmares. Nina also feels very uncomfortable in social and intimate situations. She appears to be unable to successfully interact with those around her. The interaction that Nina has with her fellow dancers appears to be strained and superficial. Nina exhibits behavior that indicates she views all other dancers as competition instead of …show more content…

Nina’s sub-personality seems to be the complete opposite of Nina herself. The sub-personality displays confidence, lustfulness, and deceitfulness. She has also attempted to hurt Nina through self-mutilating while in control.
Nina is also having many hallucinations, besides seeing her sub-personality, she has seen feathers growing out of her skin, her legs crack/bend, and drawings of herself moving and taunting her. Schizophrenia seems to be the conclusion from these symptoms. Nina also is extremely paranoid about others around her and has had hallucinations regarding their betrayal of her. She is delusional in her beliefs of another ballerina trying to sabotage her and take her role in the performance of Black Swan. A delusion is a strange false belief firmly held despite evidence to the contrary (Comer, 2011).
Nina has stolen many items from another dancer in her company, Beth, who she idolizes. This is a form of kleptomania; the impulsive need to steal even though often times they have more than enough money to pay for the things that they steal (Comer, 2011). This is a projection of Nina’s id impulses; she believes that if she takes these items from Beth then she might be like her.
Following the DSM-IT-TR (2011), I have concluded the following diagnosis for Nina Sayers:
Axis I: Generalized Anxiety Disorder
Axis II: Paranoid Personality Disorder, Dissociative Identity Disorder,

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