The End of Jim Morrison [PDF]

Zitiervorschau

PSYCHOTHERAPY: THEORY, RESEARCH AND PRACTICE VOLUME 14, #4, WINTER, 1977

THE END OF JIM MORRISON: A SCHIZOID SUICIDE—A PHENOMENOLOGICAL STUDY IN OBJECT-RELATIONS WARREN P. HOPKINS

HAROLD J. FINE University of Tennessee Knoxville, Tennessee

University of Richmond Richmond, Virginia

ABSTRACT: Reviewing the circumstances surround- singer-idols: Jim Morrison, lead-singer of "The ing the death of pop singer Jim Morrison, the authors Doors", a famous Los Angeles rock group. His have come to believe not only that his end was death by "natural" causes, as "official" reeffected through suicide, but also that his death was a ports have it, appeared suspect. Moreover, compelling instance of the schizoid-type suicide de- there exists compelling evidence that a scribed by Harry Guntrip. Guntrip wrote that the schizoid-type suicide is more congruent with his schizoid problem—the persistence through life of a untimely death than is a heart attack. Certain weak infantile ego characterized by anxiety and fear and caused by inadequate mothering — lay deeper in features of his life style, poetry, personal statethe strata of the unconscious mind than the oedipal ments, and friends' observations argue a strong conflict. Sure enough, Morrison wrote and spoke case for a suicide interpretation. Objectblatantly and wittingly on the subject of his lust for relations theory not only affords insights into his mother and hate for his father. Despite his Morrison's life, and attributes a certain logic to consciousness of his oedipal conflict, his schizoid ego his death, but it also seems to have spoken very weakness festered in him out of his control. This was personally to Morrison as well, for as will soon evinced in his needs, apparent in both his lyrics and be obvious, he was not unfamiliar himself with his actions, to lash out at but also escape from the the literature. outer world. Indeed, many of the details of his Object-relations theory is probably the most personal life—his relationship with his girlfriend, his fantasies of escape through death and sex, and trenchant development within ego Psychology finally his death itself—seem to conform to Gun- in recent times (Kernberg, 1972; Stein, 1969). trip's portrait of the schizoid personality. Morrison s Beginning with Melanie Klein's studies of insuicide, then, was not the final manifestation of the ternalized objects in early infancy (Klein, inverted, destructive anger found in the depressed 1932), and followed by Fairbairn (1952) and individual, but rather an expression of the wish to be Winnicott (1958, 1965), the body of clinical removed to a calmer realm.

Those who have crossed With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom Remember us — if at all — not as lost Violent souls, but only As the hollow men The stuffed men. T. S. Eliot "The Hollow Men" Being recently enriched by the new insights of psychoanalytically-derived object-relations theory, one could not help but be fascinated by a piece of sensational, though well-researched, journalism (Wolfe, 1971) exploring the provocative death of one of the "pop" culture's

and theoretical studies relevant to the area emerges for synthesis and integration. This challenge was met with considerable success by Harry Guntrip (1961, 1969, 1971). Guntrip's contributions to object-relations theory, especially, have not only broadened the spectrum of ego theory applications and technique, but also opened the road to a newer understanding of early normal and pathological development of the person. More specifically, he has applied this integrated object-relations theory to the intensive, long-term treatment of schizoid personalities. And it is against this background that the case of Jim Morrison bears particular relevance. Six days after his death, official Paris police

423

424

H. J. FINE & W. P. HOPKINS

reports confirmed the original information: Jim Morrison died of a heart attack while taking a bath on July 3, 1971. At age 27, Morrison was the most flamboyant but least open of "The Doors", and as lead-singer, lyricist, and poet, he came to be the symbol for the group. And for many youth, he represented the crest of another wave of rock groups. He was riding high; there was even speculation that he was coming to be the most potent sex symbol in our "pop" culture since James Dean and Elvis Presley. His song "Light My Fire" quickly sold two million records. And others like "Break On Through," "Back Door Man," and most significantly "The End," had similarly become anthems for a generation of kids turning inward and away. In "L.A. Woman" the line "I've been down so goddamned long that it seems like up to me" spells out the enjoyment of despair and emptiness. Sexuality was Morrison's trademark; and it was an unusual perspective on sex he touted: sex-death, and a "thing" for oedipality. Even beyond his lyrics, he was frequently observed to cup his hands tightly over his genitals while singing (holding on for dear life?), and once, at a now famous Miami concert, he exposed himself to his audience on stage. Morrison's comment about this incident is just as revealing, too. "It's very, very hard to just get up on stage and sing a song when you're a sex symbol. They didn't come to hear my mouth; they were all ogling at my pants. The way they refuse to grant your mouth when they've been taught you're all below the waist is very frustrating for a poet. You come forth with your fine words and they keep on staring at your pants. I decided for once to give them what'they were in the market for . . ." (Wolfe, p. 186)

The expression of such impotent rage through genital aggression is not foreign to the psychiatric literature, nor for that matter to the public place, but what is rare in this case is the lip-service he pays to this rage on a conscious level. To wit his celebrated song "The End," where parent-killing and parent-mauling are the central themes. As one of his most emotional offerings, it is a wild outburst of oedipal passions: pop is mowed down and mom taken over. Its performance in concert is sensuously described by Wolfe: "He explains to his 'beautiful friend', his 'only friend', that this is 'the end of our elaborate plans.' He encourages her to 'ride the snake, to the lake, the ancient lake,'

the reptile being defined as 'seven miles long', 'old,' 'cold.' His growly baritone is almost sweet, almost down to a love whisper, as he laments (or crows?) that 'I'll never look into your eyes again'; but there's the rasping edge even when pitched low, the suggestion of a snarl held back, the mixture of Arctic distance and muted parody. At the mother's bedroom door, music having left him altogether (by this time he's visited pop's room and unceremoniously, with some melody still lingering, wiped him out), he falls into a toneless, grinding dirge-slack recitative. On the verge of the ghastly ellipsis, the point at which words as well as music cave in, his eyes clamp shut, his lips form the unspeakable syllables, 'I wa-a-a-ant'—he screams." (p. 182)

Now, Freud's early assumption held that of all the layers of the unconscious, the layer of the oedipal material was the deepest and most energetically repressed. This position had remained essentially unchallenged until the advent of object relations, and particularly Guntrip's conviction (1969, p. 36) that the oedipal layer is not as deeply embedded as the schizoid problem. Already, though, more contemporary psychoanalysts had seen theoretical problems arising when, for example, Stendahl in his autobiographical novel, The Life of Henry Brulard, dwelled openly and elaborately on patricidal attitudes toward the father and incestuous urges toward the mother. This circumstance, of course, is also true in "The End." How are such phenomena to be reconciled with traditional psychoanalytic theory? How do these guilt-laden secrets come to the conscious surface? Even Morrison's own lyrics make it clear that he abides the traditional Freudian position regarding incest as the most awful of transgressions. How then would he explain bellowing this straightforward confession in public? The lengthy quote that follows obtains from an interview (Wolfe, 1971) in which Morrison replies to just this question; however, Wolfe additionaly intimated that this oedipal display could perhaps be a "smoke screen" to cover something even more unspeakable. Morrison's quote here is reproduced in its entirety as a tour de force of what Guntrip (1969, p. 178) has referred to as "The Basic Emotional Predicament." "I know what you're working up to. The new orality stuff. I've read some of Melanie Klein and the others. The idea that the Oedipal layer isn't as deep as people used to think, that it gets deposited when the kid goes into the genital period and a whole lot of stuff has come together in his head before this, below it, when he was

THE END OF JIM MORRISON all mouth, and no muscle or genitals. I know the whole line of thought, man. That there was just oral passive helplessness and bawling for Big Ma before the kid began to grow muscles and came to see his genitals as muscle, and could counter his ache for Ma's shelter with a little genital aggression, at least in his fantasies. Deny yearning mouth with blustering phallus. I know this — there's a whiny toddler inside every growling rapist school. Sure. By this reasoning it's easy to make a big red badge of your Oedipality and wear it on your sleeve. It's closer to the surface and you can dredge it out a lot faster than the worse Ma-cuddly stuff under it. Use the one to hide the other . . . Cop out to the Oedipal sin because it's nowhere as bad as the oral ones that lie deeper. The crimes of the sucking babe wanting to hold tight to Mama and go on sucking forever, and feeling abandoned by the old biddy because first she ejected him, then shoved him aside, cut him off. Anybody'd rather own up to fantasy crimes of muscle than those of the blobby and flabby . . ." (p. 184)

It is hard to conceive of a more vernacular, yet accurate, statement of the basic schizoid dilemma. Even a studious reading of Schizoid Phenomena, Object Relations, and the Self (Guntrip, 1969) does not communicate so succinctly the qualitative nature of the schizoid experience. The essence of the statement bears repeating just once more: being aggressive and bad (guilty) is not as unbearable to accept as being frightened and weak (dependent). Both phenomenologically and chronologically, the whole schizoid problem antedates the oedipal development. Fairbairn (1952) thus regarded infantile dependence, not the Oedipus complex, as the fundamental cause of psychopathology. The schizoid person at bottom feels overwhelmed by the external world, his weak infantile ego withdrawing in fear. This state is "basic ego-weakness," though it is often camouflaged by a false "exterior self". The fear (and withdrawal) is primarily due to the inability of weak infantile ego to cope with external reality, having earlier been deprived of adequate maternal support. And it is a consequence of this real deprivation that the ego further experiences a hostile impulse to aggressively strike back at the rejective outer world. One "hears" the resentment in Morrison's words when he expresses these very feelings: "Booze is mother's milk to me, and better than any milk that ever came from my mother." These psychodynamics convincingly explain not only Morrison's aggressive exhibitionism in public, but also the defensive posture he adopts with regard to infantile dependence ("the new

425

orality stuff"), especially when he is so "wise to it." Guntrip (1969, p. 129) has warned that patients can "use" their conflicts over sex, aggression, and guilt (". . . and their Freudian inner world of oedipal conflicts . . .") as a last resort defense against withdrawal, regression, and depersonalization, even though the conflicts may have their own obvious significance on their own specific level. This problem of basic ego-weakness was more apparent, not unexpectedly, in Morrison's private life than in his public image or poetry. Morrison had once reflected "that when you're going on two, everything looks old and big as hell and feels pretty chilly; you're the one scared!" People who knew him well, and were skeptical about the "natural" death, contributed these opinions about his apparently increasing decompensation: " . . . The Jim I knew had a king-size block as a writer; for him to get off even a few lines a week might look like a burst of activity close up . . . " " . . . During the last two years in L.A., he was alarmingly lazy, passive, sodden, lumpish, inert, and getting more so all the time . . ." ". . . I knew him too well to believe there'd been a sudden surge of life-affirming in him . . . " On a more intimate level, his love relationships were at an impasse. The "in and out programme" Guntrip (1969, p. 27) describes as problematic for the schizoid is well represented in Morrison's case by the report that in his relationship with his girlfriend cum-wife "he kept up his old on-again/off-again style of living: one apartment with her, one without . . . " This kind of interpersonal oscillation, so diagnostic of schizoid conditions, reflects the need for but fear of close relationships—always needing love but a dread of being tied, rushing into a relationship for security and urgently breaking out again for freedom and independence. The central feature of the schizoid personality is the inability to effect personal relationships because of a radical immaturity of the ego; there exists a complex inhibition of the capacity to love and be loved. And on a yet more intimate level, we glimpse the nature of Morrison's sexual behavior and experience through the disclosure of a previous "lover" (Wolfe, 1971). She claims that he was "mostly impotent, often taking hours," sometimes giving up. And besides the sadomasochistic games he enjoyed (talking dirty to

426

H. J. F I N E & W. P. HOPKINS

her, spanking her, telling her what a bad girl she was — "it excited him"), he would blame her for his sexual failures, occassionally getting violent enough to leave bruises after beating and choking her. She recognized in Morrison the brute and the baby, co-existing: . . . "a lot of roughing up, then the sudden collapse, whimpering, 'I need someone to love me, please take care of me, please don't leave me . . . ' " Guntrip (1968, p. 153) has challenged the notion that the deepest roots of psychopathology are sexual and/or aggressive instincts; rather, as Morrison displays here, they are secondary to the elements of fear, anxiety, and flight. These instincts operate in disturbed ways only in the fear-ridden person as a means of overcoming devitalization and passivity. Oscillating between fight and flight, the schizoid manifests outbursts of sexual and aggressive behavior that function as a manic defense—a frantic attempt to fend off devitalized passivity. Morrison's "lover" recalled a line of his poetry: " . . . we seek to break the spell of passivity with actions cruel and awkward . . . " Her final remark was, "Kids will remember him as tough, brutal, bestial, savage. The image I keep is a different one."

tiredness" caused by the unremitting struggle to avoid collapse is frequently experienced as a wish to die. But it exists as an "unrealistic" conception, for it contains elements of escape to something else, rather than finality of existence. To stop living but not wishing to die. The schizoid suicide is encountered in the very regressed ego, where the person has utterly lost hope of being understood and helped. The longing to die represents the schizoid need to withdraw the ego from the world that is too much for it to cope with. From a published collection of Morrison's poems and notes (1971) comes this piece: " . . . The theory is that birth is prompted by the child's desire to leave the womb. But in the photograph an unborn horse's neck strains inward with legs scooped out. From this everything follows: Swallow milk at the breast until there's no milk . . . " Whereas the depressive suicide suggests a hostile and destructive impulse turned inward against the self, the schizoid suicide is the end-product of apathy toward a life that can no longer be accepted. What is desired is not a destructive non-existence, but an escape into warmth, quiet, comfort, a Nirvana—a return to Jim Morrison was quite obviously a desperate the womb. Did the official report say "while and despairing young man, and nowhere is this taking a bath?" reflected more poignantly than in his poetry. He This is the way the world ends often adopted the poetic posture of being-onThis is the way the world ends the-outside looking in—not uncharacteristic of This is the way the world ends the schizoid condition. These persons often Not with a bang, but a whimper. refer to their experience of feeling withdrawn — T. S. Eliot and cut off from outer reality. Morrison mused "The Hollow Men" (meaning himself no doubt), "People have the feeling that what's going on outside isn't real, REFERENCES just a bunch of staged events." Morrison desperately wanted to "Break on Through." And BEYLE, H. M. (Pseudonym: Stendhal) The Life of Henry Brulard. London: Merlin Press, 1958. other songs as well as the poetry communicate that he didn't like being where he was—he ELIOT, T. S. "The Hollow Men." Collected Poems. New York: Harcourt, Bruce, & World, 1958. wanted to be someplace else. To escape "Way FAIRBAIRN, W. R. D. Psychoanalytic Studies of the Perback deep into the brain, Back where there's sonality. London: Tavistock Publications, 1952. never any pain." GUNTRIP, H. S. Personality Structure and Human Interaction. New York: International Universities Press, 1961. His poetry betrays a preoccupation with death GUNTRIP, H. S. Schizoid Phenomena, Object Relations, and sex, both as means of liberation from life. and the Self. New York: International Universities Press, "Light My Fire" strains for a release from the 1969. cycle of birth-orgasm-death. And textual GUNTRIP, H. S. Psychoanalytic Theory, Therapy and the Self. New York: Basic Books, 1971. analyses of the poetry establish a consuming theme of sex-death and death-sex, and how to KERNBERG, O. F. "International Object Relations: Building Stones of the Mind." Contemporary Psychology, 17, get to one by means of the other. No. 1, 1972. The seriously schizoid person has a unique KLEIN, M. The Psycho-Analysis of Children. London: Hogarth Press, 1932. rapport with death. The apathy and "life-

THE END OF JIM MORRISON MORRISON, J. The Lords and the New Creatures. Simon & Schuster (Touchstone Paperback), 1971. STEIN, H. "Reflections on Schizoid Phenomena." Psychiatry and Social Science Review, June 1969. WINNICOTT, D. W. Collected Papers: Through Pediatrics to Psycho-Analysis. New York: Basic Books, 1958.

427

WINNICOTT, D. W. The Maturational Process and the Facilitating Environment. New York: International Universities Press, 1965. WOLFE, B. "The Real Life-Death of Jim Morrison." Esquire, June 1971.