Case Analysis - Lady Gaga
She is known for her outrageous sense of fashion and her racy artistic risk-taking. She portrays herself as a female pop icon, desperately needing to inspire others to celebrate all the things they hate about themselves, because she relates to feeling different (Harpo Productions, 2010). Her name is Lady Gaga. Through the psychoanalytic eyes of Karen Horney and Erik Erikson, we will explore the inner workings of this most eccentric mind. We will dare to ride the train that began at station Stefani Germanotta, and continued on its way to its current station, Lady Gaga. In doing this, perhaps we will discover an answer to the question I have asked for nearly three years: is Lady Gaga who she says she is?
Before she arrived to red carpet events encased in a giant egg, Stefanie Germanotta lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan with her family. She arrived by subway, just like the average New Yorker. She attended a private Catholic school, describing her academic and social life as insecure. “I used to get made fun of for being either too provocative or too eccentric, so I started to tone it down. I didn’t fit in, and I felt like a freak” (Metrolyrics, 2009). Germanotta’s battle with her identity began at the age of thirteen, around the same time she realized she could pour her heart into her art. In Karen Horney’s interpersonal psychoanalytic theory, she describes basic anxiety as “the feeling a child has of being isolated and helpless in a potentially hostile world” (Cloninger, 2008, p. 155). Germanotta, raised in an incredibly supportive home, had both her mother and her father present during those crucial periods of development, and they were nothing but loving, according to Stefanie. Therefore, Horney’s theory that inadequate parenting produces anxiety cannot be sufficiently supported. However, her school and social environments were less than ideal. Could anxiety have developed during a later stage for Germanotta? She often felt the need to mold herself to match the ways of her classmates, so much so that once, she bought a Gucci handbag to avoid feeling like a freak (Avi, 2010). As Stefanie developed into Gaga as we know her now, this basic anxiety, a result of the unfortunate insecurity she felt due to her peers’ disapproval, caused her to develop an aggressive, “moving against” personality type.
Horney describes moving against types as narcissists and perfectionists. Aggressive and prideful, they can be competitive and display an extreme need for recognition (Cloninger, 2008, p. 157). Focusing on self-absorption and the need for adoration, we see that Lady Gaga exhibits this tendency on more than one occasion, yet conceals it with confusing statements and peculiar clothing. A telling example of Gaga’s unhealthy self-admiration and need for recognition can be inferred from this statement by the pop diva herself:
A year from now, I could go away, and people might say, ‘Gosh, whatever happened to that girl who never wore pants?’ But how wonderfully memorable 30 years from now, when they say, ‘Do you remember Gaga and her bubbles?’ Because, for a minute, everyone in that room will forget every sad, painful thing in their lives, and they’ll just live in my bubble world (Grigoriadis, 2010).
Her narcissism allows her to imagine that people will feel free from their sadness because she wore a dress made of bubbles. It is in her mind that her bubble dress represents sovereignty for all of those who feel different, but from a bird’s-eye view, her clothing is hardly ever perceived as more than a wild fashion statement. She needs obscure costumes to draw others into her world, because this is her only way to assure that she will be adequately admired. She experiences personal joy and satisfaction by wearing costumes, and since much of her wardrobe is easily replicated, she can bond with her fans (CNN, 2010). She wants her fans to not only live in her bubble world, but to become her. Indeed, her words simply reflect her deep-seated insecurity and need for attention.
Horney believed that neurotics adopt a defense mechanism to solve conflicts over basic anxiety. Moving against types “eclipse part of the conflict and raise its opposite to predominance” (Cloninger, 2008, p. 160). Lady Gaga eclipses her painful insecurity and emphasizes confidence and leadership. On a positive note, this strategy may “allow a person to adapt sufficiently to cope with daily life” (Cloninger, 2008, p. 160). However, it may not always solve the conflict or lead to growth. The healthy individual balances all three interpersonal orientations – moving toward, moving against, and moving away. Anxiety is what causes neurotic conflict, an imbalance between the three interpersonal orientations, thus causing an individual to “turn away from the real self toward some seemingly better (less helpless, less angry) idealized self” (Cloninger, 2008, p.160). Horney would agree that the idealized self is the image an individual wishes to portray; the real self is “the alive, unique, personal center” of an individual (Cloninger, 2008, p.160), breeding the potential for growth. The neurotic always avoids the real self in effort to support the idealized self.
Said Lady Gaga to Rolling Stone (2010), “When I wake up in the morning, I feel just like any other insecure 24-year-old girl. Then I say, ‘You’re Lady Gaga! You get up and walk the walk today.” Cloninger wrote, “The idealized self may become the basis for intense striving” (2008, p. 161), and this is exactly what Gaga has created. Stefanie Germanotta truly feels insecure and unhappy, but her goal to be Gaga has become the center of her life. Perhaps she imagines, “If I impress people with my achievements and power, they will not be able to hurt me, and they may even admire me” (Cloninger, 2008, p. 161). She disguises her real self, a fragile and insecure girl, with outrageous costumes, masks that obstruct her face, wigs in the shape of bows, and stilettos that sometimes lack the heel. This is the image she has created that reflects her idealized self: how she wishes to be seen by her public. Interestingly enough, it is probable that Gaga is well aware that she is feeding into her idealized self. In fact, this could be part of her artistic vision. Visually, her stunts seem to shock us the same as they did from day one. Lyrically, however, Gaga has grown from the release of her first album, The Fame, to her latest album, Born This Way. Songs once devoted to party themes such as, “Just Dance”, now preach individuality, as with her most recent diva anthem, “Born This Way”. But is this the same growth that Horney believes leads an individual away from the idealized false image and towards the image of the true self? It’s hard to say, because the same album that praises individualism also speaks Gaga’s anticipated, desperate plea of, “I just wanna be myself, and I want you to love me for who I am” (Hair, Track 6, 2011). Could her music represent her real self? If so, why does she go through so much trouble to – quite literally – mask the pain?
Gaga wrote the song “Speechless” (2009, Track 4) about her father after learning of his declining health. Should he die, she would never “write a song” or “sing-a-long” again, suggesting the profound influence her father has on her. By describing her father’s “Johnnie Walker eyes”, she implies that her father could be an alcoholic. She then suggests, to characterize the sadness she feels, to “raise a glass to mend all the broken hearts of my wrecked up friends”, symbolizing her own alcohol-abuse and negative friendships. As a young woman living in the East Village of NYC, she chronically abused cocaine and other drugs. During this phase of her life, her father refused to speak to her. She identifies with her father’s alcoholism by claiming it for herself. She constantly seeks his approval. Her father only approved her music, but after seeing her first show in Manhattan’s gritty downtown scene, he refused to attend her shows anymore, fearing that she was mentally unstable (ABC 20/20, 2010). He is a strict Italian man with a conservative Catholic upbringing, and would rather separate himself from his daughter than feel misrepresented by her crude performances. Because she doesn’t feel that her dad truly accepts her for who she is, she must overdramatize the view of her idealized self, made clear through wild fashion choices and incredibly provocative shows. The downward spiral continues as she avoids her real self, which seems obviously present in her lyrics.
Barbara Walters chose Lady Gaga as one of her Most Fascinating People of 2009, and this honor is indisputable. Fascinating might be the perfect word to describe Lady Gaga’s most obscure approach to art and fashion. Using Karen Horney’s theory, we evaluated a proposed understanding of Gaga’s personality: in her childhood, she experienced a basic anxiety that encouraged an aggressive, moving against approach to interpersonal relationships, narcissism, an extreme need for attention, all which eventually resulted in her current battle between the idealized and real self. Let us continue exploring her dynamic personality through the eyes of the psychosocial expert himself, Erik Erikson.
Like Horney, Erikson concerns his theory with the way an individual develops socially. His epigenetic principle states “anything that grows has a ground plan, and that out of this ground plan the parts arise, each part having its time of special ascendancy, until all parts have arisen to form a functioning whole” (Cloninger, 2008, p. 128). This principle inspired his eight stages of psychosocial development. “For a whole, healthy ego to develop, several parts must develop sequentially” (Cloninger, 2008, p. 128). At each stage, an individual experiences a crisis, a supposed turning point, and ideally, resolves the crisis with what Erikson coined as an “ego strength” or virtue (Cloninger, 2008, p. 128). This virtue is added to the toolbox of “ego skills” for the individual to use throughout life. There is always a positive and negative aspect of each virtue; both must be achieved, the positive pole representing the larger ratio, for healthy, functional development (Cloninger, 2008).
We see Lady Gaga’s first maladjustment at psychosocial stage number four: industry versus inferiority (Cloninger, 2008). The childhood bullying by her classmates automatically caused Stefanie to feel inferior. In order for others to like her, she thought she needed to “produce” something that was not genuine to whom she believed she was. In the classroom environment, she did not achieve a healthy sense of self-worth, and according to Erikson, this is an essential part of childhood growth. Therefore, competence, Erikson’s virtue for this stage, was not fully developed. Stefanie became an extreme perfectionist. She prefers to handle most of the extravagant work herself, including designing all of her own costumes. (She does, however, have a “haus of Gaga”, her team of associates who physically makes the costumes). Erikson says an “overemphasis on work as a basis of identity” (Cloninger, 2008, p. 135) can be especially harmful to the development of an individual’s personality. Perhaps Gaga overcompensated for her lack of competence by making her work the center of her life. She is the quintessential workaholic. She told MTV, “Something that I have or fear is never being able to enjoy myself” (Vena, 2009). Her work comes before any social life. Her determination to succeed is admirable, however, is it ideal to be this extreme? Erikson would probably answer, “No.”
Because Gaga did not develop an ideal sense of industry, she was not as well equipped upon entering her first adolescent identity crisis. In an interview with an MTV journalist, she explained the true essence behind her diva-like persona:
I’ve always been Gaga. It’s just that all the years of schooling and being in a Catholic environment and living in a place where we were kind of told what was the right way to be, I suppressed all those eccentricities about myself so I could fit in. Once I was free, I was able to be myself. I pulled her out of me, and I found that all the things about myself that I so desperately tried to suppress for so many years were the very things that all my art and music friends thought were so lovely about me. So I embraced them (Ditzian, 2009).
This statement sheds new light, asserting that grown-up Gaga recognizes how Stefanie avoided her inner calling to satisfy how the world envisioned her. Cloninger wrote, “Attaining identity can be described as the development of a personal narrative or life story” (2008, p. 132). Through Gaga’s music does she invite her audience to personally experience her life story. In an interview with Oprah, Gaga said, “It’s nice to have a safe space where I don’t feel like such a freak all the time” (Harpo Productions, 2010). It is during these identity crises that she seeks the stage most. She wrote her first ballad at thirteen, and formally performed for the first time at fourteen. Ironically, she seeks the safety behind her performance art to avoid feeling like a freak, while simultaneously doing everything possible to go against the social norm in terms of music performance and fashion. In fact, she made the above statement wearing a wig in the form of a blonde spiked Mohawk. Does Gaga feel like a freak inside because she disagrees whole-heartedly with the values of today’s society? Or does she actually fear that she might be accepted by society, and therefore must retaliate against this fear in the form of her art?
Gaga is known to speak outlandishly at times, but in an interview with Harper’s Bazaar, discussing the prosthetics she glues on her face and body, Gaga replied the following, raising the question if her identity has been achieved healthily or not:
“Well, first of all, they’re not prosthetics. They’re my bones. They’ve always been inside of me, but I have been waiting for the right time to reveal to the universe who I truly am. They come out when I’m inspired. We all have these bones! They’re the light from inside of us” (Blasberg, 2011).
Unlike Karen Horney, who distinguished between the real and idealized self, Erikson was more concerned with identity: “the awareness of the fact that there is a self-sameness and continuity to the ego’s synthesizing methods, the style of one’s individuality, and that this style coincides with the sameness and continuity of one’s meaning for significant others in the immediate community” (Cloninger, 2008, p. 132). Lady Gaga has no problem styling her individuality, as seen in her outlandish costumes, including her “prosthetic bones”, and catchy pop rhymes and rhythms. Perhaps she sees the world as equally ridiculous, and her music and wardrobe exist as a statement to mirror this perspective.
James Marcia, a researcher of the development of the psychosocial stages, introduced the identity status paradigm (Cloninger, 2008, p. 143). If the individual experiences a crisis, questions who she is, and then commits to an action to produce her desired outcome, this person has obtained identity achievement. However, someone in moratorium, the period when an individual is “free to explore various possible adult roles without having the obligations that will come with real adulthood” (Cloninger, 2008, p. 132), might be “philosophically concerned, rebellious, and nonconforming” (Cloninger, 2008, p. 143). We certainly see these characteristics in Lady Gaga, and although she is no longer in adolescence, she is still relatively young at only twenty-four years of age. However, an identity achiever, described as clear, consistent, and productive (Cloninger, 2008, p. 143), also correctly identifies Gaga. In her rebellious, nonconforming way, she is perfectly consistent, consistently surprising, and says several times her music is her life. She told Rolling Stone (2011), “I don't feel alive unless I'm performing, and that's just the way I was born.” It is reasonable to say that since she has achieved her life-giving force, the ability to express herself through art, she has finally achieved the ego strength from her identity crisis: fidelity, which is “the ability to sustain loyalties freely pledged in spite of the inevitable contradictions of value systems” (Cloninger, 2008, p. 132). This is evident through her incredible devotion to her fans. She is known to send fans, who spend hours (even days) camping out to see her shows, pizza and doughnuts just so they don’t go hungry (Greer and Dyball, 2011, p. 88).
It seems that Lady Gaga in her childhood made the choice to become the star that she is today. Although many young people dream of being rich and famous, Gaga believed in herself enough to make this dream a reality. Apparently the drive inside of her is stronger than the insecurity, pain, and frustration she feels in daily life. Erikson claimed that “later developments can to some extent modify an earlier resolution” (Cloninger, 2008, p. 129). It seems that in Gaga’s latest album, she has revisited stage three: initiative versus guilt. Cloninger writes (2008) “the child can make choices about what kind of person to be, based in part on identifications with the parents” (p. 131). Gaga’s mother was a musical theatre major, and her father performed in a Bruce Springsteen cover band. Her inspiration to become a musician was sufficiently modeled in both of her parents. However, it is possible that Gaga has recently reevaluated her decision of what kind of person she chose to be. In her song, “Judas” (2011, Track 4), she sings, “In the most Biblical sense, I am beyond repentance. Fame hooker, prostitute wench vomits her mind. But in a cultural sense, I just speak in future tense. Judas, kiss me if offenced, or wear an ear condom next time. I wanna love you, but something’s pulling me away from you. Jesus is my virtue, and Judas is the demon I cling to.” Religiously, these lyrics are quite heavy, and socially, they symbolize her rejection of her portrayed image and consequent actions. Perhaps it is this striking honesty, her fearlessness to freely admit the shameful, that allows her to continually explore her growing identity. Perhaps Gaga’s costumes are not masks at all, but rather visual extensions of her ever-changing identity.
In Erikson’s theory, the identity is crucial for healthy adulthood, and it seems that, despite how bizarre her reality may seem to others, Lady Gaga has achieved the awareness necessary to move forward towards stage six: intimacy versus isolation. “Intimacy involves a capacity for psychological fusion with another person, whether a friend or lover, and must secure that individual identity will not be destroyed by the merger” (Cloninger, 2008, p. 133). Grigoriadis (2010) reported that Gaga eagerly announced, “I can mentally give myself an orgasm” (p. 3). Although Erikson stressed that psychological and sexual intimacy were not the same (Cloninger, 2008), we might infer that Gaga is a self-pleasure seeker, whether it be for sexual or for platonic purposes. She outwardly avoids intimacy and seeks isolation, and even sings about it in many of her songs. Erikson referred to distantiation as the counterpart of intimacy, defining it as “the readiness to repudiate, to isolate, and if necessary, to destroy those forces and people whose essence seems dangerous to one’s own” (Cloninger, 2008, p. 133). Gaga ends her “Bad Romance” music video lounging on a bed, a fire-blazed gun in hand, next to a skeleton, the dead remains of the lover in her story. Her coy, mysterious nature suggests that she seeks detachment from her emotions and the intimacy of human relationships, and will destroy, as Erikson claimed, what she does not trust. If Gaga is ever intimate, perhaps it is when she is tickling the ivories or sexually thrusting in a pool of fake blood at one of her performance art shows.
Gaga told Oprah (2010) she often feels isolated in the celebrity world, so instead she befriends her fans (Harpo Productions). I am not an expert on Lady Gaga’s personal life, but her statement implies she has not successfully formed an intimate relationship with another person, thus suggesting a lack of the ego strength love (Cloninger, 2008). To compensate for the lack of love, she developed “friendships” with her fans. For someone with such remarkable international celebrity status like Lady Gaga, it is difficult to imagine that she can have truly valuable relationships with her fans, considering she has the top number of Twitter followers of any user on Twitter: ten million and counting (ladygaga, 2011). However, she does talk highly of her fans, proclaiming to feel grateful and blessed to have them. Gaga told Larry King, “My fans were salivating at the mouth, they were rabid, and they just couldn’t wait for me to sing my new songs. They looked like Monsters in the audience” (CNN, 2010). She has since dubbed herself as “Mother Monster” and her fans as “Little Monsters”. Traditionally, a mother’s love is pure and unconditional, but have we gone too far to say that Gaga has achieved the virtue of love by means of this loophole? Cloninger says (2008) “cultures may provide other forms [of love] besides the nuclear family for shaping the sense of community” (p. 136). Is Gaga on her way to defining her own culture, thus creating a sense of community that embraces a new understanding of love: Gaga love?
Finally, we see Lady Gaga where she is today, oscillating between the great understanding of her complex identity and her role as a generative individual of society. Erikson named stage seven: generativity versus stagnation. “Generative individuals are highly involved in their world and the growth of young people, and are concerned about broader societal issues” (Cloninger, 2008, p. 133). Generativity can often times be expressed through the role of parenting (Cloninger, 2008, p. 133) – perhaps it is even more symbolic now that Gaga refers to herself as Mother Monster. In terms of societal issues, Gaga constantly takes political stances to fight for what she believes is right. Consider her appearance at the MTV Music Video Awards in 2010. Wearing a dress made of meat, she sparked outrageous controversy. Gaga explained on the Ellen DeGeneres show (2010) that the dress was in response to the members of the U.S. military who had been discharged from the service due to the Don’t’ Ask, Don’t Tell policy. Gaga said, “It is a devastation to me that I know my fans who are gay feel like they have governmental oppression on them. If we don’t stand up for what we believe in, we don’t fight for our rights, pretty soon, we’re gonna have as much rights as the meat on our bones. And I’m not a piece of meat.” Gay and Lesbian Rights are of top concern for Gaga, and even inspired her to lead a rally in Maine, where she addressed this rather personal issue, as she herself is bisexual (Germanotta, 2010). As a highly generative individual, Gaga designs her shows to empower her fans. She told Larry King, “So much of the show is about rejecting insecurity, and the fans and I relate to it. I’m not interested in being a perfect, placid pop star that looks good in bikinis. My fans are troubled, and so am I. I’m more interested in helping my fans love that they are different, and reject the rules from societies telling them to not love themselves. I want them to feel like freaks” (CNN, 2010). Perhaps the idea of feeling like a “freak”, which seems to appear as a common thread from Germanotta to Gaga, is not meant to be a negative image after all. Although it is true that her performances trigger controversy, every breath she takes is for the love of her art and her fans. She is successfully developing the seventh virtue, care, as she genuinely cares for her fans. She passionately embraces the eccentricities of the individual. She often reaches out to the youth who feel lost, lonely, or confused using her music.
Using Erikson’s theory, we were able to go deeper into the intricate development of Lady Gaga’s intriguing personality. First and foremost, she achieved a sense of identity, and we must leave it up to Gaga to claim its genuineness. She actively strives to serve as a positive role model for troubled youth around the world. Although some psychosocial stages did not develop ideally, only time will tell if the ground plan she has set will arise to form a completely functioning Lady Gaga (Cloninger, 2008).
At last, we have reached our destination: station Lady Gaga. Is she who she says she is? The answer rests only within the Mother Monster herself. As the clock ticks, she will have no other choice but to reveal what may (or may not) be hiding inside.
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