IS ANGELINA JOLIE CREATING THE TOMBOY IN SHILOH?

Credit: INFphoto.com

In August Vanity Fair issue, while promoting her upcoming action thriller film “Salt,” Angelina Jolie made some shocking revelations about her four year old daughter Shiloh. She admitted to dressing Shiloh, “like a little dude. Shiloh, we feel, has Montenegro style. It’s how people dress there. She likes tracksuits, she likes [regular] suits. She likes to dress like a boy. She wants to be a boy. So we had to cut her hair. She likes to wear boys’ everything. She thinks she’s one of the brothers.”

 Jolie said that she wasn’t worried about it; she was a tomboy just like Shiloh as a kid, but reviewing some of her childhood pictures I don’t see this boyishness at all in her photos. She might have had some physically active behavior often attributed to a tomboy, but that doesn’t equate to a male-like appearance or behavior. Many girls are physically athletic and still bear little likeness to any boys.

 After receiving some criticism and negative publicity, Angelina Jolie defended her parenting by stating the following:

 “I think she [Shiloh] is fascinating, the choices she is making. And I would never be the kind of parent to force somebody to be something they are not. I think that is just bad parenting,” she told Reuters.

 Interesting perspective of Jolie; she goes from obviously coaching and/or suggesting that she approves and supports this suspected “boyishness” in Shiloh to defending it in the name of the child’s so-called independent life choices. My question is where does Jolie draw the line between the child’s choices and her own subconscious psychological projections? Many psychologists make a big issue of allowing the individual to emerge even at the cost of rational behavior. But what ever happened to releasing the child’s spirit from the overwhelming domination of a mother’s subconscious rebellion?

 The reason I say this is that I feel Jolie’s personality is extremely influential in shaping the psychology of this child. Ask yourself, is Shiloh actually expressing herself or is she being guided via Jolie’s subconscious social archetype? I sense that Jolie’s archetype is and always has been a rebellious male-like figure that took over early in her life and created a bisexual split in her personality.

 This aspect represented an angry, impotent, yet curiously willful, rebellious and repressed female that wanted to get back at her father and the world. It is also a personality fragment that emerges as the tomboyish superwoman that strives for recognition in the bulk of her movies – and this new movie Salt is a good example.

 Sure, she makes a major issue of being a sex bomb albeit one that seems to want to get even with men through an exaggerated female character. She seems to want to dominate men and put them down, emasculate as she did the male character in Wanted. I see her as acting out a sort of sado-masochistic dominatrix on a mission from hell. Even her efforts at motherhood seem overblown, out of context, extreme, unrealistic as if she is out of sync with her female side.

 An old song by Pink Floyd comes to mind and won’t get out of my head, “Teacher, leave those kids alone!” But in this case I want to insert, “Jolie, leave Shiloh alone! Stop making a distorted example out of her femaleness to shove in the face of the world. It won’t restore your own lost femininity.” Somehow in this light I can see that her Mother Theresa character is really an extreme attempt by Jolie to get back in touch with her neglected and abandoned, female archetype. She really does need to fully let go of her buried anger.

  

Credit: Vanity Fair

NAHU’S PSYCHIC JOURNALISM~

Copyright 2010 by Nahu

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