In her New York Times review of Darren Aronofsky's latest film, Black Swan, Manohla Dargis warns against "pop-psychological interpretations" that "flatten" this unabashedly manipulative, maddening extravaganza of high and low impulses. Indeed, such an interpretation risks giving the director more credit than he perhaps deserves, more interested in beautifully destroying his female subject than he is psychoanalyzing her. But ignoring all psychological interpretations of any artwork drains the very life from it, rendering the piece impotent and ultimately drawing a dangerous line, especially for a movie one could credibly classify as a "psychological thriller."
In its continued effort throughout the 20th century to foster credibility and reduce damaging misconceptions, the oft-lamented, frequently indestructible field of "pop psychology" has been something of an anathema to the rest of the field of psychology. Modern psychologists strive for both precision and complexity, demystifying the once impenetrable recesses of the mind, often with rigorous scientific methodology and the latest in technology. Pop psychology continually threatens to destroy all of that effort with over-simplified generalizations and outright misinformation. In the new self-help world, everyone is an expert. Or should I say "expert"? There within the sarcastically negating quotation marks lies the rub. Is there value to the work of the indefatigable pop psychologist? That is, can an individual not formally trained in psychology espouse any psychological truth? If the answer is no, then what implications does such a belief have on how we interpret artwork? Should a piece of art ever be psychologically interpreted? Does it matter if the piece seems to invite such an interpretation, or resist it? In short, when does such an interpretation "flatten," say, a movie?
To return to Manohla Dargis' original quote, I suspect that what she means is that, like most criticism leveled at pop psychology, a pop psychological interpretation simplifies the artistic credibility of the piece by seeming to have all the answers. Good art, in Dargis's view, resists the kind of easy interpretations that pop psychology invites, unsettling the viewer's preconceptions and demanding novel thoughts.
To argue for value in such an interpretation one must turn to the related, less derided cousin field of "folk psychology," often conceptualized as "mindreading" in social psychology or "theory of mind" in developmental psychology. Folk psychology, as originally conceived, concerns itself with the psychological insights that people make on an everyday basis. How do lay people think about the mind? This is a question with significant implications, because we are all folk psychologists. Every one of us, as human beings, must think about the minds of others in order to navigate our social world, and judgments and decisions are made every single day based on this supremely unscientific form of knowledge.
With the wealth of knowledge available to us now from decades of work on the ways in which individuals think about others' minds, it would seem that pop psychology, which is essentially folk psychological interpretations magnified and disseminated (to often misinforming ends), must have some value, despite its frequent dissociation from science. And ultimately that is what that the battle is all about: Science versus willful ignorance of science. Pop psychology purports truth without (or with dubious) evidence, training, and knowledge. Yet it is also a product of the mind, and is thus worth studying and taking seriously, as long as one understands it for what it truly is.
What, in fact, is the purpose of flirting with mental illness (delusions, paranoia, compulsions) in any piece of work while resisting psychological interpretations? Is it to upend our conceptions of what can be interpreted in art? Does a psychological interpretation somehow render the piece mundane, neutralizing the mysterious fog of madness with DSM-approved diagnoses?
A resistance to pop-psychological interpretations of art would seem to ironically perpetuate the kind of misinformation and willful ignorance that gives the field its bad name. In other words, resisting psychological interpretations maintains the kind of vaguely romanticized haze of indefinable madness, bereft of knowledge and hopelessly antiquated, that pop psychology frequently and unwittingly dabbles in.
To return to the issue of art criticism, claiming that a pop psychological interpretation "flattens" a piece effectively denies the role of the psychological in the piece outright. It drains the piece of meaningful interpretation and misses the point of criticism of any artwork entirely.
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