The Pathology of Projection – Von Trier’s Castration Anxiety on Display

Projection, Castration Anxiety, and Sadistic Fantasies: Lars von Trier’s cinema can be read as a sustained act of acting out – the external staging of internal conflicts that he cannot symbolically resolve. In psychoanalytic terms, von Trier appears caught in a loop of projection and disavowal fueled by profound castration anxiety. Lacan reminds us that symbolic castration – the acceptance of one’s lack and separation from the (m)Other – is a prerequisite for relating to others as truly Other (Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist: Executioner at the Alter of the Other, Part 2 – Offscreen). Only through undergoing castration does the subject move beyond solipsistic fantasy and ask, “What does the Other want of me?” (Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist: Executioner at the Alter of the Other, Part 2 – Offscreen). Von Trier’s films, however, betray a refusal of this fundamental psychic step. Rather than countenancing any limit on his phallic omnipotence, his narratives enact a furious denial of lack, as if to ward off an intolerable vulnerability. In Antichrist, for example, the male protagonist’s rejection of castration anxiety manifests in literal violence: the film pointedly references the historical trauma of witch-burnings as a kind of male panic at threatened manhood (Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist: Executioner at the Alter of the Other, Part 2 – Offscreen). By symbolically “burning” or mutilating the female other, von Trier’s stand-in is attempting to annihilate the reminder of his own castratable state. In Kleinian terms, this is classic paranoid-schizoid defense: the aggressive impulse is expelled (projected into a female figure construed as evil or crazy) and then destroyed in effigy (Melanie Klein and Repression Mechanism). The sadistic torture we witness on screen thus becomes a perverse purge ritual – von Trier’s pathogenic fantasies are hurled outward at his characters (and by extension the audience) in an attempt to exorcise his inner terror. Jean Laplanche’s insight into the “enigmatic signifier” of the Other is also relevant here: von Trier’s psyche was seeded with an unspoken traumatic enigma – a message of betrayal and confusion – which he now compulsively restages. Indeed, he has repeatedly cited a shocking real-life disclosure as a key to his psyche: in 1989, his dying mother confessed that the man who raised him was not his biological father but merely a convenient husband – she had conceived Lars with another man “to give [her son] ‘artistic genes’” (Lars von Trier - Wikipedia) (Lars von Trier - Wikipedia). This belated revelation devastated von Trier, precipitating what he called his “first real breakdown” (On the Experience of a Melancholic Gaze). Here was castration in its most personal form: the mother’s secret undermined his very identity and filiation, demonstrating her godlike power to manipulate his reality. The fury and betrayal that he could not resolve are palpable in the sadistic scenarios of his work. (Tellingly, von Trier later admitted that Melancholia was created as a giant “Fuck you!” to his mother (On the Experience of a Melancholic Gaze) – a belated, symbolic parricide of the maternal figure.) In light of this, the obscene violence in his films reads as an acting-out of unprocessed trauma. Rather than working through castration anxiety by accepting limits, von Trier disavows it, projecting his fear into female characters who are then made to suffer or die. Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection is illuminating here: the abject is that which the subject expels to erect a fragile border of self (‘What Did Your Mother Do To You?’ The Grotesque, Abjection and Motherhood in The Others (2001), Mama (2013) and The Conjuring (2013) - MAI: Feminism & Visual Culture) (‘What Did Your Mother Do To You?’ The Grotesque, Abjection and Motherhood in The Others (2001), Mama (2013) and The Conjuring (2013) - MAI: Feminism & Visual Culture). Von Trier’s grisly tableaux of mutilated women represent an attempt to cast out the “impure” source of his anxiety – the (m)Other who haunts him – in order to preserve an illusion of invulnerable selfhood. In short, his art transforms personal nightmare into external horror, forcing the audience to bear witness to – and in a sense contain – psychic contents von Trier himself refuses to contain or metabolize.

Violence as a Defense Against Care: The extreme violence visited upon women in von Trier’s films can be understood as a defensive formation – a psychic fortress erected against the very notion of being cared for. Underneath the grand guignol cruelty lies an incapacity (and unwillingness) to receive care, one so profound that it is warded off with theatrical sadism. From a developmental perspective, one might speculate that von Trier never internalized a reliable holding environment in the Winnicottian sense. His upbringing was, by his own account, emotionally barren – his parents were atheists who “did not allow much room in their household for feelings, religion, or enjoyment” (Lars von Trier - Wikipedia), and his mother’s ultimate betrayal shattered whatever basic trust might have existed. In this context, accepting care or empathy from an other would require a vulnerability that von Trier’s psyche experiences as dangerous – a potential repetition of betrayal or castration. Thus, instead of engaging with themes of healing or genuine intimacy, his films compulsively stage scenarios that invert the caregiving relation into sadomasochistic domination. The caregiver – often figured as a woman who offers or symbolizes nurture – is brutally punished on screen as if to declare sovereignty against any dependency. We witness this across his oeuvre: the selfless heroines of his “Golden Heart trilogy” (e.g. Bess in Breaking the Waves or Selma in Dancer in the Dark) suffer grotesque martyrdom for their loving kindness, as if their purity itself must be annihilated; in Antichrist, the character identified only as She, a grieving mother, is first “treated” by her husband’s arrogant therapy and then ultimately murdered, her attempt to embody maternal care turned into literal witchery that “deserves” execution. This is care turned upside-down – a nightmare mirror of the dependency that von Trier cannot tolerate. Melanie Klein would recognize in these scenarios the operation of projective identification fueled by terror of the maternal object. The feminine caregiver is split into an all-bad persecutor (the “castrating” mother imago) and attacked without mercy. Von Trier’s He (often a stand-in for the director’s ego) remains “innocent” by casting all sin and weakness into Her, then obliterating Her. As Klein noted in her analysis of early sadistic fantasies, the child who cannot tolerate its neediness or rage will defensively project aggression and then attempt to destroy the object that now embodies its own hated impulses (Melanie Klein and Repression Mechanism). So too does von Trier’s camera enact a fantasy of sadistic omnipotence – striking down women who dare to care. From a clinical standpoint, this dynamic exposes profound cowardice. To call von Trier “cowardly” in this context is not mere insult but a diagnostic observation: he is too afraid to be helped. He lacks the basic trust to place himself in a position of vulnerability vis-à-vis another. Instead, he concocts elaborate trials to prove (to himself) that he has no need for tenderness – that any figure offering love or solace is false and will be duly punished. In psychoanalytic therapy, patients often resist care too, but through the slow development of the therapeutic alliance they may come to accept the analyst’s help and move toward growth. Von Trier refuses any such surrender. His violent misogyny is a pre-emptive strike against the humiliating prospect of needing anything from anyone. It is as if he announces: “I will destroy the one who cares for me before she can disappoint or dominate me.” In doing so, he traps himself in a cyclical revenge against a phantom mother, rather than ever risking the vulnerability required for real psychic change.

Authoritarian Masquerade and the Caricature of Masculine Strength: Compounding these defenses is von Trier’s authoritarian aesthetic – a self-conscious performance of dominance that barely conceals the fragility it is meant to obscure. As a director and public figure, von Trier cultivates an image of the auteur as tyrant-provocateur. Even his adopted name, the aristocratic “von” Trier, was a deliberate affectation chosen in film school “because it seemed the most provocative thing” he could do (Authority Issues: Questioning Authorial Control in the Films of Lars von Trier » PopMatters). This persona is itself a construct – what the PopMatters critics called “the confrontational construct” of von Trier (Authority Issues: Questioning Authorial Control in the Films of Lars von Trier » PopMatters) – assembled to project an aura of control. His reputation “rests on his ability to create and shape narratives of control,” and indeed he “often works within narratives of control” in his films (Authority Issues: Questioning Authorial Control in the Films of Lars von Trier » PopMatters). Yet this obsession with control is frequently a hollow performance, a feint. Critics have observed that von Trier will toy with appearing to cede power or to undermine his own authority, all the while surreptitiously pulling the strings (Authority Issues: Questioning Authorial Control in the Films of Lars von Trier » PopMatters). In other words, his oeuvre exhibits a fetishization of mastery – an almost compulsive need to assert, through style and story, a position of unquestioned authorial power – even as true confidence eludes him. The result is a flimsy caricature of masculine strength. One might say that von Trier’s “strength” is all staging and no substance. He caricatures dominance through hyperbolic cruelty and technical control, but this only highlights an incapacity to embody genuine strength – which would require comfort with uncertainty, empathy, and mutual recognition (qualities anathema to his cinematic universe). We can view his authoritarian flourishes as a kind of false self (to borrow Winnicott’s term) – a defensive shell developed to cope with early environmental failures. Having lacked a nurturing framework in which to develop an authentic sense of self, von Trier seems to rely on grandiose posturing as a substitute. It is no accident that many of his films subject their protagonists to authoritarian regimes or sadistic “games” (the rigid moral community in Dogville, the forced humiliation of The Idiots, the psychosexual ordeal of Nymphomaniac). These scenarios re-enact a world of harsh, one-way power – as if strength could be proven by dominating or degrading others. But this is performative masculinity at best. It convinces only within its own closed circuit. Outside the perverse logic of his films, such exaggerated displays read as insecure, even adolescent provocations. True resilience or bravery – the capacity to acknowledge weakness, to embrace care, to respect the other’s subjectivity – is nowhere to be found. In Lacanian terms, one could say von Trier is stuck in the Imaginary register of phallic narcissism, unable to traverse the Symbolic castration that would actually anchor his identity. His authoritarian aesthetic, then, is less a mark of mastery than a symptom of its absence. It is flimsy precisely because it has to constantly announce itself. Like a tyrant who knows his throne is built on quicksand, he must shout ever louder and punish ever more severely to maintain the illusion of control.

Sadistic Cinema vs. Therapeutic Encounter: Von Trier’s relationship to his audience further underscores the pathological nature of his project. In a therapeutic framework, no matter how hostile or resistant a patient might appear, there is an underlying (often unconscious) hope for relief and understanding – a wish to be helped. The therapeutic setting establishes a hierarchy of care: the patient suffers but also trusts (or learns to trust) that the analyst will hold their pain without retaliation, and will return it in metabolized, bearable form. Wilfred Bion described this function as containment – the therapist absorbs the patient’s projected fears and aggressions (the beta elements) and digests them, feeding back insight (alpha function) rather than violence. Crucially, the patient-analyst dyad is founded on an ethical agreement: the patient consents to the process and the analyst commits to doing no harm. Von Trier’s cinematic practice inverts every aspect of this healing model. His films constitute a unilateral assault on the audience’s sensibilities – a kind of forced feeding of his undigested psychic material, without the audience’s negotiated consent or any intent to heal. If we consider the movie theater as an analogous “frame,” von Trier essentially abuses that frame for sadistic transference enactments. He projects his most violent fantasies into the viewer’s mind’s eye, not to work through anything in a shared space, but to make the audience feel as overwhelmed and anguished as he does. Thomas Ogden, expanding on Bion, noted that projective identification can function not only as a fantasy but as a real interpersonal manipulation, a coercive maneuver to provoke feeling in the other (On the Experience of a Melancholic Gaze). Von Trier’s films operate precisely in this register: they manipulate the audience into absorbing his distress, terror, and rage. But unlike an analysis – where the analyst would remain steady, process the projection, and help the patient reintegrate – here there is no such ameliorative structure. The audience is left holding the projections, assaulted by them. In effect, von Trier conscripts the viewer as a container for his own pain, without providing any containment for them in return. This is sadistic in the clinical sense of foreclosing reciprocity. The director gets catharsis (of a primitive sort) by evacuating his aggression; the audience gets traumatized, left to fend for themselves with the unprocessed emotional fallout. The hierarchy of care is stood on its head – instead of the one in pain seeking help, the one in pain punishes those who have come to witness. Furthermore, any intimation of a helping figure within the films is swiftly corrupted or destroyed. For instance, in Antichrist, the therapeutic stance of the husband (Willem Dafoe’s character) devolves into patriarchal domination and is ultimately revealed as hollow; “He” is more interested in proving his invulnerability than actually helping “She,” and so even the film’s diegetic attempt at therapy becomes another exercise in control and cruelty. In Nymphomaniac, the listener who feigns a therapeutic ear ends up exploiting the patient’s story for his own perverse ends. Over and over, von Trier stages a perversion of the helping relationship, reinforcing his cynical view that seeking or offering help is futile at best, and more likely dangerous. The fundamental element that therapy requires – a patient’s willingness to be helped, however ambivalent – is utterly absent in von Trier’s engagement with his audience. He does not invite viewers to understand or heal him; he forces them to endure him. This is the diametrical opposite of a collaborative analytic encounter. As a result, there is no transformation, no working-through – only a repetition compulsion in the form of art. Von Trier’s sadistic projection onto his viewers thus stands as a kind of anti-therapy, an enactment that offers no mutual growth, only the temporary discharge of tension for the “patient”/director at the cost of traumatizing the witness.

Abjection of the Maternal – Punishing the ‘Castrating’ Caregiver: Underlying the patterns above is a specific target of von Trier’s aggression: the maternal or caregiving feminine figure. His films repeatedly turn women who love, nurture, or sacrifice into scapegoats for his rage. Symbolically, these women function as stand-ins for the “castrating mother” – the figure who, in the classical Freudian scenario, is imagined to wield the terrifying power to render the son impotent (by revealing his lack or demanding his submission to social law). Julia Kristeva’s work on the abject clarifies how the maternal comes to be seen as both coveted and loathed in the male psyche. The child’s first experience of abjection, says Kristeva, occurs in separation from the mother’s body – an ambivalent process of breaking away from what was once total unity (‘What Did Your Mother Do To You?’ The Grotesque, Abjection and Motherhood in The Others (2001), Mama (2013) and The Conjuring (2013) - MAI: Feminism & Visual Culture). If this separation-individuation is fraught or incomplete, the maternal object remains as an internal phantom, alternately alluring and threatening, that the subject feels compelled to expel. Barbara Creed, building on Kristeva, famously argued that the horror genre encodes male fears of the maternal in the figure of the monstrous-feminine (‘What Did Your Mother Do To You?’ The Grotesque, Abjection and Motherhood in The Others (2001), Mama (2013) and The Conjuring (2013) - MAI: Feminism & Visual Culture) (‘What Did Your Mother Do To You?’ The Grotesque, Abjection and Motherhood in The Others (2001), Mama (2013) and The Conjuring (2013) - MAI: Feminism & Visual Culture). In horror, the mother (or mother-surrogate) often appears as a grotesque, uncanny force that must be destroyed to re-establish the patriarchal order (‘What Did Your Mother Do To You?’ The Grotesque, Abjection and Motherhood in The Others (2001), Mama (2013) and The Conjuring (2013) - MAI: Feminism & Visual Culture). Von Trier’s cinema unabashedly participates in this tradition, albeit in a more psychological register. He takes women who embody care – mothers, wives, good Samaritans – and renders them monstrous or abject through suffering. Sometimes the woman herself goes mad or violent (as in Antichrist, where She mutilates her own genitals and attacks her husband – a literalization of the castrating woman stereotype), and sometimes she remains ostensibly innocent but is subjected to monstrous torments (as in Breaking the Waves or Dancer in the Dark). In both cases, the message is that female care is dangerous and must be extirpated. It is crucial to note that von Trier’s wrath against the maternal is overdetermined by his personal history. The mother who gave him life also deceived him profoundly; in psychoanalytic terms, she is the originary object who turned bad. His attempt to cope has been to split “Mother” into extremes – the idealized fantasy of artistic pedigree she bequeathed, and the hateful betrayer who lied – and then unconsciously to replay that split on screen. The women in his films oscillate between saintly and devilish, often collapsing from one into the other. This is the splitting characteristic of what Klein called the paranoid-schizoid position, where the psyche cannot integrate good and bad aspects of the other into a whole. In Antichrist, the wife is at first a grief-stricken, sympathetic figure (the loving mother broken by loss) but gradually she is revealed – through the husband’s accusatory lens – to be aligned with chaos, evil, and even witchcraft. She literally becomes a “wicked witch” in the narrative, complete with mutilation and murder, thus justifying her brutal elimination by the husband. This narrative arc reads like a dramatization of what Betterton observed in horror films: the threat of the abject maternal is “displaced onto the monstrous or the alien, which must be expelled in order for…psychic resolution [to be] achieved” (‘What Did Your Mother Do To You?’ The Grotesque, Abjection and Motherhood in The Others (2001), Mama (2013) and The Conjuring (2013) - MAI: Feminism & Visual Culture). By the film’s end, He (and implicitly the male viewer) achieves a ghastly “resolution” by burning the wife’s body, eradicating the maternal presence. The final shot, however, is telling: a horde of women (the murdered witches of history, perhaps) ascends the forest hill – an uncanny suggestion that the repressed maternal-abject cannot be so easily purged. Yet von Trier seems unable to take that suggestion in. Each new film repeats the punishment of a caring woman as if for the first time. One could say that von Trier’s entire body of work is a elaborate ritual of violent recusal of the feminine. He cannot accept the care of the (m)Other – be it literal mother, wife, or even a metaphorical stand-in for Mother Nature – so he must continuously enact its rejection. The caregiver is tortured and banished so that he, the authorial subject, can avoid confronting his dependence on her. It is a tragic irony that in doing so, he also sacrifices the very aspects of humanity associated with growth and creativity: openness, trust, and the fusion of Eros (love) with art. His sadism kills love on screen in order to protect a terrified, regressed ego. The authoritarian pathology at the heart of von Trier’s vision thus comes into sharp focus: what masquerades as fearless filmmaking is, in fact, a fear-driven reflex – the unending attempt of a wounded child to strike back at a mother he experienced as annihilating.

In sum, Lars von Trier’s films function less as works of artistic catharsis than as symptoms on display. Through a psychoanalytic lens, we see a man caught in a compulsive repetition of his earliest traumas and terrors, unable (or unwilling) to symbolically work them through. His cinematic universe is one where projection eclipses insight, where acting out supplants dialogue, and where the possibility of care is perverted into cruelty. One is left with the impression of an auteur who, for all his technical brilliance, remains imprisoned in the dungeon of his own psyche – a dungeon he eagerly invites us into, only to assail us once we’re captive. It is a cinema of spectacular defenses: projection abounds, castration anxiety undergirds every shock, and sadism becomes the law of the land. But behind those defenses looms the specter of psychic collapse. Von Trier’s violent misogyny, his authoritarian posturing, his assaults on audience and characters alike – all bespeak a fragile self, “too cowardly” (in the apt words of this critique) to face the pain of needing love. In rejecting and punishing the (m)Other, he attempts to prove his invincibility, yet only succeeds in broadcasting his woundedness. As clinicians know, what is not transformed will be transmitted – often in destructive ways. Von Trier transmits his untransformed pain to his viewers, enacting a kind of contagion of trauma rather than a healing. The therapeutic alternative, by contrast, would demand humility and courage: the courage to relinquish omnipotence, to let oneself be held in another’s mind, and perhaps to forgive the original injury. That is a journey von Trier has not yet taken. His films, this coda argues, stand as extravagant monuments to a defensive refusal – brilliant, infuriating, and ultimately stunted monuments to a psyche in revolt against its own salvation.

Sources:

(Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist: Executioner at the Alter of the Other, Part 2 – Offscreen) (Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist: Executioner at the Alter of the Other, Part 2 – Offscreen)Salecl, Renata – on Lacanian symbolic castration enabling human relations.(Lars von Trier - Wikipedia) (On the Experience of a Melancholic Gaze)Von Trier’s mother’s deathbed confession and his ensuing breakdown (Husband 2008 interview via Bainbridge 2014).(On the Experience of a Melancholic Gaze)Von Trier admitting Melancholia was a “Fuck you” to his mother (Bainbridge 2014).(Melanie Klein and Repression Mechanism)Klein, Melanie – on projection of one’s sadism into an object and destroying it as defense.(‘What Did Your Mother Do To You?’ The Grotesque, Abjection and Motherhood in The Others (2001), Mama (2013) and The Conjuring (2013) - MAI: Feminism & Visual Culture) (‘What Did Your Mother Do To You?’ The Grotesque, Abjection and Motherhood in The Others (2001), Mama (2013) and The Conjuring (2013) - MAI: Feminism & Visual Culture)Creed, Barbara (applying Kristeva) – on the monstrous-feminine and abjection of the maternal in horror.(Authority Issues: Questioning Authorial Control in the Films of Lars von Trier » PopMatters) (Authority Issues: Questioning Authorial Control in the Films of Lars von Trier » PopMatters)PopMatters (2016) – on von Trier’s cultivated persona and narratives of control.(On the Experience of a Melancholic Gaze) (On the Experience of a Melancholic Gaze)Bainbridge, Caroline (2014) – on von Trier’s work as potential space vs. Bion’s view of projective identification as interpersonal manipulation.(Lars von Trier - Wikipedia)Wikipedia – on von Trier’s parents’ disdain for “feelings” in his upbringing.