From Anakin Skywalker to Darth Vader: an attempted character study Part Two.

"Are you angel? An angel...I've heard the deep space pilots talk about them. They live on the moons of Iego, I think. They're the most beautiful creatures in the universe."

- Anakin Skywalker to Queen Amidala

Welcome back to Part two of this character study, and I do apologise for the slightly long delay between posts. Hence, without further ado let's get started, with the above quote guiding us into Anakin's inner world of idealisations and devaluations stemming from his early life experiences described in the previous post.

It becomes evident through the series that as Anakin continues to develop, the intensity of his emotions deepen, with a reducing capacity to effectively regulate them. His pursuit of 'love' is relentless, unbridled and all consuming. His abandonment fears pervade his entire being, and his rage is corrosive within and destructive without. His belief systems: the decorative motifs on his psychological armour of anger-become increasingly rigid, and self-centred. These motifs, these schemas then only serve to maintain the burning fires of seething resentments and rage that both encase Anakin and sear him from inside out.

Predisposed by the dynamics of maternal idealization, loss and abandonment I detailed in the first post, he unconsciously idealises Princess Amidala with implicit expectations that she will respond to his reaching needs with the perfect nurturance and love of a perfect mother substitute. And of course, as most readers will know, pristine, pure perfection is never attainable.

Thus the Princess is being asked- no, demanded- the impossible by Anakin. No one in reality is able to identify with the heights of an omnipotent, omnipresent idealization. Anakin wants her to be the All Good, All providing Goddess-Mother who will finally soothe and nurture his past hurts: the Madonna as opposed to the Whore. This all good-all bad split (Melanie Klein’s classic Paranoid-Schizoid position) is clearly evident in his interactions with the Princess/later Queen, however it also pervades his belief systems and his entire perspective on the world.

As a side note, I am reminded of the destructive narcissistic dynamics characterising the relationship between Dorian Grey and Sybil Vane in Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Here, I believe (and I am perhaps identifying a little with Anakin’s external locus of control and tendency to project!) that the Jedi council may have failed in not engaging in their collective potential to help him evolve and adapt. Both Yoda and Obi-Wan Kenobi – as they would years later with his son Luke – constantly rebuke Anakin about his lack of self-control and his tendency to be almost entirely led by the yoke of his emotions.

Given their status as great Jedi masters (again I admit, I may be guilty of idealization here and placing them on a very high but unstable celestial pedestal), they may have been in a position to absorb Anakin’s rigid projections with awareness, to transform these to a more balanced and dynamic sense of being for Anakin to gradually internalise, to help him attain a more integrated, Kleinian depressive position.

Borrowing from French psychologist Vallerand’s conceptualization, Anakin, as we all do, had the potential for positively transforming his ‘obsessive’ and hence ruminative passions, to a more ‘harmonious’ and reflective quality. As we shall see, tragically this never occurred until after his eventual death.

Clearly it is not entirely the fault of the Jedi. Once again, Anakin unconsciously projects unattainable ideals onto these potentially healing paternal figures, and once again gilds this with conscious unidirectional expectations on what the Jedi should be doing for him, feeling constantly betrayed and frustrated when things do not proceed entirely according to his agenda. This dynamic lays the foundation for idealization’s shadow: Devaluation.

And Anakin begins to devalue his Jedi masters. At the core of this devaluation is an increasingly fixed narcissistic belief that they are not bestowing upon him the Power he craves as the ‘Chosen One’. This craving for power is overcompensation for the hurt he feels pervaded by the unattainability of an idealized maternal love, and hence is intricately and destructively linked with his obsession for Queen Amidala. As Master Yoda predicted: fear is now flaming anger, in turn crystallised and expanded by his growing hatred.

Anakin’s inner turmoil and his increasing loss of faith in the Jedi rendered him highly vulnerable to the psychopathic manipulations of the Sith Lord Palpatine, who later proclaimed himself as the Emperor of the Galactic Empire. Palpatine embodied all four domains of what clinical psychology defined as the components of ‘Evil’: Psychopathy, Malignant narcissism, Machiavellianism (so overtly evident in his intricate political manoeuvring as Senator Palpatine) and a Sadistic drive to ultimate power. This combined with his extremely high intellect and capacity for cognitive but not emotional empathy (a distinction I borrowed from Professor Simon Baron-Cohen) made him a very dangerous and destructive force indeed.

And what more efficient way for a malignant narcissist to increase his capacity for control then to prey on a hypersensitive narcissist? This is what Palpatine instrumentally achieved with Anakin: he sensed very clearly all- every single one -of Anakin’s vulnerabilities, and under the guise of an all-providing father substitute, promised to fulfil all of Anakin’s projections without exception. Once again I am inclined to compare this situation to Dorian Gray, whose sociopathic father figure was Lord Henry Wotton, watching and engineering Dorian's self-fragmentation with a delight borne of scientific curiosity at the complete expense of empathy.

Anakin naively falls into this intricate; superficially attractive web of deceit weaved on the promise of power denied to him by the Jedi. Anakin shifts his idealizations onto a psychopath who deliberately and instrumentally takes on Anakin’s projections and expectations. Palpatine promises the deliverance of unending emotional validation, fatherly love and the bestowing of Power. Anakin thus becomes the Sith lord’s narcissistic part object, and it is at this point that his pathway to an identity transformation to Darth Vader accelerates.

This path, as many of you know, is colored with a bloody rampage of murder. Murder of others, and symbolically the murder of unwanted aspects of himself as he begins to identify entirely with ‘bad’ part objects. In rejecting the more complex and dynamic, but still polarized ‘good’ world view of the Jedi, he embraces the more extremist, self-centred, ‘Dark’ framework of the Sith.

It is Anakin’s annihilatory obliteration of The Good that we turn to in Part 3 of this character study series.