The Role of the Mother in the Development and Formation of the Psychotic Organization of Personality, Illustrated by the Film “Beau Is Afraid”

Relationships with primary objects largely determine what kind of personality structure an individual will form. And if these relationships are pathological and destructive from the very first days, then they will most likely form a personality of the psychotic, most disorganized type. The presented work is devoted to a review of psychoanalytic theories concerning the influence of the specifics of relationships with primary objects on the formation of a psychotic personality structure. In particular, the authors hypothesize that the relationship with the mother, colored by incestuousness, narcissistic seduction and fusion, paradoxicality, annihilation, coupled with the squeezing out of the father’s figure (preclusion of the Name of the Father) from the child’s world leads the latter to the formation of a psychotic personality structure, disorganization, which becomes his own a kind of protection from the intrusive destructiveness of the mother. Psychoanalytic psychotherapy is increasingly and more confidently used to work with psychotic clients, although the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, considered such work impossible. The review made in this work, albeit not complete, of psychoanalytic theories on the designated topic, the analysis of what specific features of primary relationships lead an individual to psychoticism, what the world of a psychotic consists of, can be useful for novice therapists for a better understanding of clients with such a personality structure, their conflicts and anxieties in order to more accurately structure therapeutic tasks in working with them. Theoretical basis is illustrated by the film “Beau is afraid” (2023, directed by Ari Aster), which quite accurately conveys the horror of the psychotic world of the main character, where the boundaries between internal and external, dreams are erased and memories, events of objective reality are mixed with hallucinations so that one flows into the other.