"Someone Must Die": Delegated (Self)-Murder as a Solution of Depressive Psychosis in Lars von Trier’s Antichrist

Psychoanalysis of cinema

Abstract

This article examines the mechanisms of formation of the phenomena of delegated suicide and, as we called it, delegated murder, as ways of psychically coping with the intolerable affects of psychotic level depression. In order to illustrate these psychic solutions, we analyze the film Antichrist (2009) by screenwriter and director Lars von Trier. Delegated suicide and delegated homicide are decisions that represent a way out of the psychotic level of depression and implemented through the work of the mechanism of projective identification, including the participation of the defense mechanism of splitting the self into "good" and "destructive" objects. If suicide represents a melancholic solution, since it is an actinic, reactive, behavioral pathway peculiar to borderline personalities, then in case of psychosis we are talking about a category of psycho-neuroses, whose specific feature is an attempt to solve intrapsychic conflicts through mental elaboration, mentalization. With delegated murder or suicide, the satisfaction of the need for punishment is achieved, and the affect of guilt is bound. Delegated suicide is an act in which the individual, through projective identification and projection, forces another person, an object, to commit suicide by projecting his sadistic and self-destructive feelings into it-these processes will also be illustrated through the film Antichrist. Delegated murder is an act by which, through the action of projective identification and delusional induction, the subject forces the object, the other, to kill him (i.e., the subject), having previously projected into the object a fragile "good" inner object (the fragile mother), which must be protected from its own destructiveness. In other words, the subject rescues the good inner object from its own destructive impulses and terrifying hatred, at the cost of his own life. At times this decision is provoked by the subject's own sadistic feelings getting out of control and is achieved by putting the subject before a choice: either he will be killed or he must kill. To put it bluntly, "If you don't kill me, I will kill you".