Notice the imagery surrounding Big Nurse. What is she symbolic of? Thematically, how is she opposed to Mac?
The Big Nurse represents totalitarian authority, attempting to control every aspect of the patients’ lives. She seems reminiscent of a Hitler/Stalin type figure, ruling with an iron fist. Like these dictators, she is an expert in controlling/persuading people through her speech. She is the embodiment of the establishment, while Mac is the revolution. She is control and repression, he is freedom and sexuality. Mac is basically Ratched’s shadow (see below) representing everything she suppresses in her own life, and attempts to suppress in others’.
The Shadow-In Carl Jung’s personality theory, the ego represents the individual’s sense of personÂal self. The sense of personal identity is purÂchased, however, at the expense of certain tendencies that are rejected as ‘not-self’. According to Jung, these rejected traits come together as a kind of unconscious ‘counter-ego’ which he termed the shadow. We may become unduly anxious or irritated when in an environment or around a person that in some way reminds us of repressed aspects of our self. If a person has rejected his or her own sex drive, for example, that person may feel irrational fear or anger around an overtly sexual individual. The shadow may appear as a person in one’s dreams, usually as an individual of the same sex. Of all the archetypes, the shadow is the most powerful and potentially the most dangerous. It represents everything about ourselves that we fear and despise.
Josh
Ms Cowie's Class through Chief Bromden’s eyes
She’s always sitting at her computer when I come in, the first one there as usual, yet even without the class the room buzzes. It’s not the electronics though, at least not the visible ones. The ones they hide from us, the ones that watch us every minute, connected directly to her computer. When we don’t behave she uses it but it doesn’t work on me, I know about it you see, those cables connecting us, they only affect you if you don’t know they’re there. Slowly everyone else comes in but as more people join me the fog gets thicker until even I can hardly see the wires watching us, and I have to wonder how they can see us in return.
Ashleh and Nicole
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