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The movie Beau is Afraid, by American director Ari Aster, was released in 2023 and elicited mixed reactions from audiences due to its experimental and grotesque nature. Rich in psychological and symbolic content, the film remained largely incomprehensible and even frightening. The movie is often referred to as a Freudian farce, a nightmarish horror-comedy, or a tragicomic Oedipal odyssey. The director himself has described his work as “hellish Freudian picaresque.” The film is saturated with psychoanalytic meaning, illustrating not only the theory of Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, but also theories by present-day psychoanalysts of the French and British streams. We propose to look at this movie through the prism of modern European psychoanalysis as a vivid illustration of the psychotic world, where the boundaries between inner and outer spheres are erased and where the events of objective reality are mixed with hallucinations. The article puts forward a hypothesis about the influence of the relationships with mothers and fathers (in psychoanalytic terms, “primary objects”) on the formation of the psychotic personality structure.

 

A psychoanalytic view of the psychotic personality structure

The psychotic personality is characterized by disorganization, unstable emotions and moods, diffuse anxiety, thought disorders, and diminished or absent ego functions. The psychotic person has difficulty with reality testing, lacks the ability to integrate good and bad aspects of the self, and faces problems with self-identity, emotion regulation, delusions, hallucinations, and paradoxical beliefs. Psychotic individuals experience extremely contradictory states. Thus, they may experience hopelessness and feel insignificant, shameful, or empty; in contrast, they may also have feelings of omnipotence, grandiosity, and exclusivity. A psychotic state is characterized by a fusion relationship, because the psychotic person cannot bear the realization that he or she is not one with the significant primary object and instead is separated from it. He or she denies this separateness—the boundary between himself or herself and the Other—and his or her psyche is confused about the difference between individuals, genders, and even generations. The psychotic person’s superego is archaic and terrifying. Such person’s world is filled with haunting objects, which are sometimes initially perceived as good as long as they are neither too far nor too close. But as soon as the relationship progresses, these objects become haunting. However, despite their intimidating nature, it is important for the psychotic person to have these objects “at hand,” for they represent detached aggressive parts of the self, even though the objects are perceived as an external reality (Chartier 2001).

Individuals with a psychotic structure protect themselves by denying reality or its significant elements. Their personality is split: one part of the self takes account of an external reality, while the other ignores it because it is intolerable (Kapsambelis 2007). According to Benno Rosenberg, French psychoanalyst known for his work on masochism, this mechanism allows psychotic individuals to get a “moment of respite” from interacting with intolerable elements of the external world and their own destructive impulses (Rosenberg 1999). At the same time, as pointed out by the landmark French psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Paul-Claude Racamier, who spent much of his professional career working with psychotic patients, psychotic denial has the inherently paradoxical task of avoiding both the intolerable loss of the object and the intolerable presence of the object (Racamier 1992). Lastly, delusional activity must be mentioned. Sigmund Freud regarded delirium as an attempt to heal the psyche through the construction of a “neoreality” more acceptable to the psychotic person (Freud 1911). Present-day French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist Vassilis Kapsambelis (ex-director of the Centre de psychanalyse Évelyne et Jean Kestemberg), specializing in psychotic states, adds that to be delusional means to somehow live a shared history with the object and to establish contact with it, albeit in a psychotic way (Kapsambelis 2013).

 

Parental relationships and psychosis

The primary environment and early relationships of an individual with his or her mother and father play a significant role in the formation of the psychotic personality structure. Psychoanalysts identify several scenarios in people’s relationships with their mother, which in extreme cases can lead to psychosis. Among these scenarios are the case of the hyper-patronizing mother who gives the child no space for development, that of the absent mother who leaves the child alone in the face of overwhelming experiences, and that of the mother who satisfies the child inappropriately, attributing her own desires to the child and ignoring his or her actual needs (Dubor 2001). According to René Spitz, an Austrian-American psychoanalyst who wrote about the importance of the first year of life in the formation of people’s personality, in these latter cases the mother unconsciously rejects the child or motherhood itself (Spitz 1965). Another trait of the psychotic individual’s mother is her desire to alienate the child from the outside world, including from the father. Thus, the mother drives the father out of the relationship, often literally. This situation leads to the formation of a phenomenon that Jacques Lacan (2013), a legendary and controversial psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who led a revision of French psychoanalysis and proclaimed a “return to Freud” in the mid-twentieth century, called the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father (la forclusion du Nom-du-Père).

A specific type of mother who can lead a child to psychosis has been described by contemporary French psychoanalysts Myriam Boubli and Jean-Claude Elbez, members of the International Psychosomatic Association who have specialized in psychosomatics: the annihilating mother (la mère annihilante) who, instead of helping her infant to process his or her affects, loads the infant with her own, destructive ones (Boubli and Elbez 2008). The child’s underdeveloped psyche cannot cope with such a task, therefore leading to overload and destruction. Racamier (2021), who worked with schizophrenic patients for many years, identified another specific scenario: the incestual scenario (l’incestuel). It involves narcissistic seduction of the child by the mother, so that the child does not secede and remains forever a part of herself, physically and psychologically, without distraction from external objects, including the father. However, the father balances the mother-child relationship and at the same time is on a par with the mother in containerizing the child and structuring the child’s psyche.

According to a famous English pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Woods Winnicott, who introduced the terms “good enough mother,” the father “humanizes” the mother in the eyes of the child so that her image does not become magical and omnipotent (Winnicott 1961). According to Lacan, psychosis occurs where there is no image of the father (the Name-of-the-Father) in the child’s psyche and when in the place of the father is a void (Lacan 2013). Psychotic persons often encounter a specific type of interaction: paradoxical communication, at the core of which is double binding—a situation in which an individual receives two irreconcilable instructions, so that it is impossible to obey one without disobeying the other (Bateson et al. 1956). American psychiatrist Harold Searles, specialized in psychoanalytic treatments of schizophrenia, believed that such communication could literally drive a person crazy (Searles 1959). Finally, a psychotic personality structure is generally formed if the described pathological relationships are practiced in the family for several generations in a row. That is, some mental disorders are likely to be found in the parents and grandparents of the psychotic person.

 

Beau and his fears

Director Ari Aster admitted in an interview that he wanted to make Beau is Afraid so that the viewer could immerse in and live the “alien personality.” It is indeed an overwhelming experience to dive into the psychotic world of the film’s main protagonist, as it is filled with violent characters, hallucinations, constant anxiety, fear of punishment, and death. At the same time, it is not clear until the very end what part of what happened in the movie was real and what part belongs to the psychotic fantasy world of the protagonist.

The plot can be divided into five acts. At the center of the story is Beau Wassermann, who goes to visit his mother Mona Wassermann in another city to commemorate the anniversary of his father Harry’s death, a journey that turns into a series of troubles, unexpected encounters, and fateful discoveries. The film begins with the main character’s birth scene, which illustrates what René Roussillon, a professor at the University of Lyon and member of the Psychoanalytic Society of Paris (SPP), has called “the pathology of initial encounter” (pathologie de la rencontre), a traumatic situation for the newborn when the first contact with the mother is overwhelmed by her destructive affects (Roussillon 2022). Exhausted by labor, Mona cries out “you made me have him,” which makes viewers question whether the child is wanted. The protagonist—Beau—is a 47-year-old man, apathetic, indecisive, and anxious. We see him at his appointment with a therapist, in conversation with whom Beau denies his aggressive feelings toward his oppressive mother, although he unconsciously feels guilty about them. When the therapist offers to speculate about these feelings, Beau loses concentration, which is how psychotic individuals protect themselves when confronting the frightening aggressive parts of their Self.

The world around Beau is filled with haunting objects. He lives in a depressing neighborhood where there are homeless and insane people, prostitutes, armed men, trash, dirt, aggressively vulgar drawings and writings on the walls, and even corpses. Beau projects his inner fears of persecution, dismemberment, and disintegration onto this external reality. This becomes especially evident in the scene when he runs through a horror-filled street to buy water and suddenly the street is empty. All the aggressive characters have moved into his empty apartment, i.e., they have remained “at hand” in some kind of parallel space (Chartier 2001).

The constant scrutiny of the hyper-patronizing mother is hinted at through the many objects surrounding Beau. Indeed, they bear the MW logo, which refers to the business empire of Mona Wassermann. The mother’s initials, like her watchful eye, follow Beau everywhere, although he does not seem to notice it. Beau’s symbiotic relationship with his mother is also symbolized by a keepsake he makes for Mona, a porcelain figurine of a woman cradling a baby. At the bottom, Beau inscribes: “Dear mom, I am sorry this is the anniversary of dad’s death, thank you. I’m sorry. Love Beau.” Symbiosis is always colored by unconscious guilt, and the protagonist here seems to berate himself for the death of his father, who has been banished from the mother-son relationship.

The main event during the first act of the movie is the news of Mona’s “death”: Beau learns that a chandelier fell on his mother and smashed her head. He falls into a state of stupor: his object of symbiosis has been destroyed, and it seems that he is about to fall apart. Trying to come to terms with the tragic news, Beau lies down in an overflowing tub. Water, in psychoanalytical terms, means the womb, where the infant feels comfortable and safe in fusion with the mother. And the scene in the bathtub can be regarded as the hero’s attempt to regain a connection with the reference object, to “re-enter into the mother’s womb.”

In another episode, Beau is hit by a car. After the accident, he finds himself in the house of Roger and Grace, the owners of the car. The second act of the movie is devoted to Beau’s stay at their house. The new acquaintances immediately become idealized objects of his psychotic world; they are the caring parents the hero never had. Roger seems like a good-natured, supportive “father,” Grace an attentive and empathetic “mother.” However, these characters ignore their guest’s main need, as he has requested a ride to Mona’s funeral. With hypertrophied care, they mask their need for the Beau figure to replace their own war-dead son. For the couple, the protagonist is not a complete person, but what Racamier (1992) called an object-utensil (objet-ustensile)—an object-function that is forbidden from having personal desires and is needed only to satisfy the desires of the Other. When promising to drive Beau to the funeral, Roger proposes that they return home “after the show” and live together “as a family.” In essence, he offers Beau a new fusion to replace the one he has lost. Roger and Grace also have a young daughter, Tony, whose severe depression they have overlooked, as they are devoured by fantasies about their dead son. When she decides to commit suicide, Grace accuses Beau of killing the girl. Thus the “new” object, which had appeared in Beau’s psychotic field as good and idealized, gets transformed into a habitually haunting and aggressive one.

Another important episode in the second act is Beau remembering vacationing with his mother on a cruise liner when he was a teenager. It is there that he met Elaine, whose picture he keeps on his bedside table. In this episode first appears the incestuous context of Beau’s relationship with his mother: they sleep in the same bed. We see his mother talking to him about an evening moonlight walk, looking at him intently, as if seducing him, and telling him that she is proud of the man he is. Teenage Beau is confused by his mother’s intrusive and obsessive sexuality, although he does not dare to reject it openly. He is frightened by her reaction when she learns of his relationship with Elaine. Indeed, Mona gets overexcited as she grills him about it, as if she were accusing a husband of adultery. Mona is jealous of the girl, and in an incestuous fusion, she attributes to her son the role of sexual partner, having previously squeezed the father out of the family.

The third act is devoted to the hero’s dreams of an alternative version of his own life. Leaving the house of Grace and Roger, Beau finds himself in the forest, where he stumbles upon wandering artists whose performance takes him into a world of fantasy and a plot about male and paternal self-actualization and healthy object relations in which he is the main character. Beau imagines a kind of performance in which he separates himself from his parents’ objects, acquires a profession, sets up a home, marries, and raises three sons. But this idyll is shattered when his village is engulfed by a flood, a veritable Old Testament flood that carries him so far away that he is torn away from his family and home for years. The image of water reappears in this scene, a maternal symbol, this time destructive, as if in punishment for his attempted separation. The imaginary play ends with Beau meeting his now grown sons, who ask about their “grandparents.” Beau retells them a “myth” composed by Mona that his own father passed away due to heart problems on the night he was conceived, just after ejaculation. Beau adds that this “genetic” disease was passed on to him, which is why he has never been with any woman. His sons thus question how they came into the world, sounding like the voice of the healthy part of the hero’s Self, which, as Freud, Racamier, and other psychoanalysts note, is always preserved in some form in psychotic patients and is capable of perceiving even the hidden truth.

The fourth act is the culmination of the movie. Beau arrives at his mother’s house; the funeral is already completed. The spacious mansion is full of pictures of Mona and her son—not a single picture of his father. On the walls, the promotional posters for products from Mona’s business empire almost all feature Beau. The hyper-controlling Mona built her business around her son’s needs and problems: pills for ADHD, allergies, insomnia, or depression. Racamier (2021) noted the agony of an incestual relationship for a child. Perhaps through all these ailments, Beau was trying to build distance from his mother. One scene shows a portrait of Mona composed of miniature photographs of her staff, which illustrates Racamier’s concept of insanization (Racamier 1980)—the conversion of truth into madness. In Beau’s world, where reality and hallucination are intertwined, it is possible that his diseased psyche has “personalized” his haunting objects by giving them the faces from this portrait.

One important scene features Beau in his mother’s house looking at a coffin containing a decapitated corpse. A birthmark on the hand of the body makes him realize that the corpse is not his mother’s but that of his nurse Marthe. He thus realizes that his mother’s “death” is in fact staged. This scene provides another example of how the preserved part of the psychotic self functions, as Beau is occasionally capable of perceiving the truth despite overall difficulties with reality testing. That same day, a woman arrives at Mona’s house, and Beau recognizes her as his girlfriend Elaine. Her arrival symbolizes his separation from his mother and the possibility of choosing another woman. Elaine takes Beau to Mona’s bedroom, “the dragon’s liar,” where they have sex. To the protagonist’s surprise, he remains alive after an orgasm, as his mother said he would, but it is Elaine who dies unexpectedly. Then, “revived” Mona appears in the bedroom, scolding Beau for desecrating the bed of his “dead” mother. Mona’s communication with her son is full of paradoxes and dual messages (so called double bind patterns, according to Bateson). On the one hand, she blames him for his lack of will and for being “born without the mechanism to choose,” and on the other hand, she perceives any of his impulses toward independence as betrayal. In their dispute, the theme of the father reappears; it has troubled the protagonist all his life. However, Mona, having composed a “myth of the father” for her son, has always forbidden him to go beyond its boundaries. Beau’s need for a father figure is reflected in his recurring dream throughout the film. In that dream, he is split into two characters: the “brave” boy, who dares to ask about his father, and the “cowardly” one, who uncomplainingly accepts the ban. In the dream, Mona gets enraged and locks the “brave” Beau in the attic, threatening the “cowardly” Beau with the same punishment if he brings up the forbidden subject.

In the fourth act, Beau does ask his mother about his father. In response, Mona cunningly lures him into the same attic he has been seeing in the dream. The scene that occurs then in the attic resembles a hallucination or a plunge into the psychotic unconscious: in the darkness, Beau sees a haggard man who is chained up and resembles himself so closely that viewers are unsure whether he is a real person or Beau’s hallucinatory vision of himself as his mother’s prisoner. Also in the attic, Beau finds a large monstrous figure of a toothy phallus with arthropod legs, which appears to be a psychotic depersonalized representation of the father, who has been reduced to a reproductive function. The American psychoanalyst Bruce Fink, who translated Lacan’s works from the French, noted that in the absence of an explanatory principle about the father, the psychotic subject tries to create his own explanatory principle with the help of delusions (Fink 1997). What Beau sees in the attic is nothing but this explanatory principle, delusional in nature.

Mona’s image illustrates Boubli and Elbez’s concept of the annihilating mother who, overwhelmed with destructiveness due to her own traumatic childhood experiences, downloads her destructive affects onto her son under the guise of anxiety and concern. According to influential English psychoanalyst Wilfred Ruprecht Bion, who conceptualized the mind, among other things, the mother’s task is to receive and containerize the infant’s raw affects (the so-called “beta elements”), process them in her own psyche, and return them to the child with safe “alpha elements,” which appear at an early stage simply as a calm reaction and acceptance of the baby’s experiences, signaling to the baby that he or she is doing fine (Bion 1962). However, Mona was not up to this task: after all, her own mother also overloaded her with hate, and her grandmother had done the same before that, as Mona’s account of her childhood makes clear that men have been pushed out of the family for generations. Thus, Mona unconsciously attacks the masculine in her own son, although she masks it with hypertrophied love. It is significant that at the moment of catharsis, Mona confesses her hatred for her son, leading to a tragedy: Beau’s own repressed affect breaks through, and, trembling with anger, he strangles his mother, killing her.

The fifth and final act entails Beau’s symbolic return to his mother’s womb, as he hopes to restore the bond destroyed by death. The distraught Beau leaves his mother’s house in the dead of night, goes to a lake, and sails away on a boat. What follows plunges the viewer into the protagonist’s deathbed hallucination. In this vision, he sails inside a cave, as if he were once again traveling along the birth canal, but in the opposite direction, and he finds himself in the middle of a water arena: Beau has arrived at the place of his “final judgment.” Here, Beau’s psychotic fear of being punished, of being exposed for his destructive impulses, of having his worst and most shameful thoughts and feelings revealed, is implemented. There are bleachers full of spectators witnessing the scene, and in a high box sits the angry, inaccessible Mona. The voice of his punishing Superego is heard by the prosecutor, leaving Beau unprotected. The archaic Superego, unlike the mature oedipal Superego, only functions to attack and punish, rather than support and defend.

“The Court” finds Beau guilty. He begs his mother for help like an infant searching for the loving eyes of his mother. But Mona is ruthless, and Beau prepares to die, which he does when the boat’s motor explodes, leading Mona to sob in despair. The prosecutor ushers her away from the podium, and the audience disperses. The play is over. Thus, the psychotic personality structure results from the complete failure of Beau’s relations with his primary object. These relations were so disorganizing and overflowing with aggression disguised as hyper-parenting (in the absence of the necessary “paternal” law) that the development of the individual was stalled. The outcome of such a failure is madness, and the movie Beau is Afraid is a thorough demonstration of this maddening process. Modern European psychoanalysis has paid great attention to the nature of psychosis and the psychotic personality structure, which are illustrated in the movie. In clinical practice, this focus helps French and British psychoanalysts, in collaboration with psychiatric colleagues, to provide psychological care and support to patients in a more effective and gentle way.

 

 

Veronika Ichetkina holds a Master in Psychology (MPsych) from the Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia. She is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist and journalist.

 

References

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Published on August 15, 2024.