John and Borderline Personality Disorder: My Pet Theory
This quote fits my pet theory that John had Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). I know some people don't like this sort of psychoanalyzing or diagnosing famous people. In John's case, I think it helps explain a lot of his irrational behavior.
To simplify, people with BPD usually have a "favorite person," whom they latch onto to create a sense of self because they feel empty inside and have no innate sense of identity. They look to others to provide it. Paul was John's favorite person until he switched to Yoko. (The million dollar question is why he did that. #something happened in India.)
People with BPD need constant attention and validation, specifically from their favorite person. They have intense emotions that are difficult to manage unless they learn specific coping skills in therapy (e.g. DBT, dialectical behavior therapy, which was developed in the 80's). They are highly sensitive to feelings of rejection. They take everything personally and interpret behavior as rejection when healthy people would not. These feelings of rejection can be overwhelming and obsessive.
TW: Suicide for discussion under cut.
Like John, a large proportion of people with BPD experienced childhood trauma. Like John, they often try to manage their overwhelming emotions with substance abuse (and/or self-harm). Suicidal ideation and attempts are also common. Based on his songs, it's likely that John felt suicidal at times.
The quote above demonstrates John's need for validation from the other Beatles, mostly from Paul. He wants Paul to come to him and ask him to write songs, to show John that Paul needs him. Think about that for a moment. It's ridiculous, right? John's job is to write and perform songs. Why does he need The Beatles Paul to ask him to do that? It doesn't make any sense to a mentally healthy person. But for a person with BPD, it makes total sense. The favorite person has to constantly demonstrate their love or else it doesn't exist. He's basically blackmailing Paul by withholding his songwriting efforts until Paul gives him the attention and love he seeks. John sees Paul's failure to ask as rejection. He's constantly on guard and looking for signs of rejection.
"Write some more 'cause we like your work." WHAT? in 1969, he needs the other Beatles Paul to tell John he likes his work? After 10 plus years of songwriting together and as one of the most successful groups in the history of pop music? That's mind-blowing. That makes no sense and sounds crazy. But it shows how little sense of self and self-worth John has. In DBT lingo, he needs to "check the facts" to get some perspective and reduce the intensity of his feelings of worthlessness and rejection.
John has an internal story about himself through which he filters and tries to make sense of the world: "I'm worthless and I don't even truly exist unless my favorite person constantly validates me." Probably Paul's abundant creativity at this time and the competitive aspect of their relationship increased John's need for validation. Perhaps he ultimately had to wrench himself away from Paul as his favorite person because the dissonance became too great between Paul as his competitor against whom he couldn't win in the songwriting contest (as drugs took over his life), and Paul as his favorite person from whom he needed constant attention and validation.
Obviously you can see how John and Yoko's relationship fulfilled his BPD needs given their total enmeshment. It wasn't healthy and it probably would've been better for him to be with someone who could hold boundaries. But that's another topic.
I guess I have to put a caveat that I'm not trying to put him down. Mental illness is an illness just like cancer or a virus. You have no control over it. It's just striking how well BPD fits John and I think it helps in understanding his weird behavior and patterns. And ultimately, even why The Beatles broke up. BPD is a horrible condition and very difficult to live with, both for the sufferer and their loved ones. The suicide rate is actually pretty high. I speak from personal experience. I wish he'd been able to get the help he needed. DBT is the major therapeutic method for helping people with BPD and it wasn't developed until the 80's.
Get back really did make me feel sorry for George tho because although some of his issues could be self inflicted, overall it’s clear he felt both underestimated and overestimated simultaneously which must be frustrating because on one hand you want to and feel like you can contribute but you’re constantly getting shut down and on the other hand you feel like you’re being asked to do things that are waaay above your skill level but ur not being listened to.
All this being said I do think he was a bit checked out emotionally which didn’t make it easy for the others to communicate w/ him either like I keep thinking back to that moment where George is like “we need Eric Clapton” and John says “we need George Harrison.”
He just kinda disengaged bc he felt it was better to not try at all than try and fail and I can completely empathise with that but I wish he could see that John and Paul were trying to support him more than he thought yk
this is not a serious armchair diagnosis, but someone analyze John possibly having BPD with me. like, all the signs were there: abandonment issues, unstable moods, irritability, having unstable self image, depressed, substance abuse, impulsivity, extreme jealousy, risk taking behavior, compulsive behavior, grandiosity, and last but not least- having a "favorite person." He literally seemed to have the textbook symptoms.
So, what do y'all think?
(and this post isn't made to put him down in any way, but to try and understand him and empathize).
When 3 educated, professional women with a lifelong love of the Beatles found each other through their fandom, and found they all shared a common dissatisfaction in how the Beatles story is analyzed and told, Another Kind of Mind was born!
A lot of John’s possessive behaviour always came from him actually being the one who wanted to be possessed imo. Because he was jealous and possessive due to being afraid of losing people but being possessed made him feel safe and secure in whatever relationship he was in. That’s why he willing to have Yoko dictate everything in their relationship, and tried to get May to do the same. It made him feel wanted.
I think we get some interesting tidbits into how Paul thinks here. It’s very interesting because he shows a lot of empathy towards John and how John wants to be with Yoko and really emphasises the need to compromise with him.
But then not more than a few hours later and he and John are talking privately and John is talking about how they need to compromise with George, Paul seems to get a bit uncomfortable and defensive and it’s interesting to ask why he feels differently in those two instances. Maybe it’s because Paul is better at compromising interpersonally rather than creatively, maybe it’s because he has an easier time empathising and relating to John rather than to George, maybe it’s a combination of the two. Overall it’s just a very interesting pattern of behaviour.
I kind of already knew this but it was further confirmed here that John is far more self aware than he lets on and that people think. It’s kinda sad actually, he can definitely see and acknowledge that his own distant, checked out behaviour isn’t really helping anything and he feels guilty over it but he’s just too emotionally drained to really be able to do anything about it. That’s honestly a feeling I relate to a lot and it’s the worst. It’s really sad to watch him go through that.
I’m so curious about what happened in the second meeting because I genuinely can’t figure out if it was that or just the location change that lifted their spirits bc holy shit twickerham vs saville row is like night and day when it comes to everyone’s attitude.
It was probably a mixture of both, I mean whatever else was going on twickerham as a place overall did seem to have kind of a gloomy vibe. It was dark and spacious dreary and I can’t imagine that environment helped if they weren’t feeling great to begin with.
Even if there was still a lot of BS going on on the business side, it’s really nice to see that they really were able to sort their shit out creatively. It’s nice to see them actually having fun.
Like maybe I’m biased but I definitely noticed especially with John — at twickerham he looked bored half the time vs at saville row where he was smiling and joking every other second. Same with George. He seemed much more comfortable with the arrangement. I really liked seeing him work out exactly what he wanted for For You Blue and everyone helping and listening.
Also should out to Mal and Micheal, the two of them have been great to watch. Micheals way more witty than I ever realised, and is also kinda no nonsense and I really appreciate that. And holy shit some one give Mal a medal cause that man has the patience of a saint. Like ik it’s his job but the amount of times one of those four clowns go “m a l, I need this” is insane. He’s also just so sweet and sincere. I didn’t realise that before now I’d never heard him speak much and he speaks so softly it’s lovely :’)
But yes overall I enjoyed it very much. We finally got to the happy part of things and it’s just nice to see them all goofing around and making music. 10/10
So I’ve seen some people in the fandom reading and citing Lesley-Ann Jones’ biography The Search For John Lennon recently and to be honest it’s concerning to me. Lesley Ann Jones has proved in the past to be an extremely untrustworthy source for info about the people she writes about. I understand that it’s exciting to have a book about John that’s not written by the typical “Lennon biographer” type (aka an ageing straight man) and for said book to also promise to shed light and focus on his bisexuality but, if we’re going to analyse John respectfully and accurately, it’s important to identify sources that are biased and untrustworthy, even if they’re technically within our favour. Especially when it relates to his queerness. And seeing as LAJ doesn’t have the best record when it comes to writing about rockstars’ sexualities in a respectful manner, it’s best to treat her words with caution.
Info about exactly how she’s a bad source is under the cut
Firstly, it's key to talk about LAJ's journalistic background when discussing what sort of writer she is: she's worked for papers such as The Sun, The Daily Mail, and The Mail On Sunday. Essentially, the bulk of her work has been for tabloids and traditionally the writing style for those kinds of publications place an emphasis on sensationalism and gossip. Now obviously that doesn’t discredit her work immediately, authors are usually able to write in more than one style so it doesn’t necessarily mean the tabloid style is going to carry over to her biographies; but it’s good to keep in mind when discussing and analysing the legitimacy of the narratives she creates and the stories she recounts in her work.
LAJ has received criticism in the past, particularly from the queen fandom of often overexaggerating, or just straight presenting false information in her bios about Freddie Mercury. She is the champion of the claim that Freddie was bisexual and not gay. Her evidence for this is over-exaggerating and (seemingly intentionally) misinterpreting the nature of the relationship between Freddie and his friend, Barbara Valentin. LAJ claimed that the two had a relationship and even lived together:
“Barbara was very open with me about the sexual relationship she had with Freddie.”
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However, no-one in Freddie’s life has ever corroborated that Freddie and Barbara were anything but friends. As for the claim they lived together, according to Peter Freestone, an extremely close friend of Freddie’s:
In the event, Freddie never actually lived there although Barbara fulfilled a huge role in Freddie’s life at that time... Freddie became very disillusioned when with more and more frequency articles were appearing in the German press’s gossip columns... about the relationship between him and Barbara... After one article claiming to have knowledge of him and Barbara getting married, Freddie... concluded that it could only be Barbara who was providing the information.
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This exaggeration of their relationship and the insistence LAJ has on presenting Freddie as bi because of it has attracted criticism from queen fans for obvious reasons. For one, it’s borderline homophobic to essentially lie about a gay man having a relationship with a woman while downplaying his relationships with men. No, she’s not portraying him as a straight man, however it’s still erasure of the specific struggles Freddie would’ve faced being a gay man in his time, therefore those who want to analyse him would be missing some of the picture when trying to understand him and his life
LAJ’s research methods are also... questionable. This is a post from Crystal Taylor (one of Roger Taylor’s roadies) about her methods for her David Bowie bio which, if to be believed is particularly concerning.
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LAJ is also known to greatly exaggerate her own relationships with her subjects. She often claims to have been friends with the people she writes bios about (coincidently the people she does this with are dead.) Back in the day she would meet with artists while on tour so the idea is convincing enough. However besides her word there’s nothing to suggest that she had close friendships with Freddie or Bowie, two people she claimed to be good friends with. There’s also this comment from Brian May which actually goes against the idea that she was close with Freddie:
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So with all of this in mind, let’s look at the quote from The Search For John Lennon that’s been circulating around Beatles tumblr:
That Bowie worshipped Lennon is no secret. He'd banged on about it often enough. The ex-Beatle had gone to his hedonism. They'd met in Los Angeles, during John's Lost Weekend. I lunched from time to time with David in New York while working there as a music journalist, before he married Iman. He lent me his house in Mustique, to write the first draft of my first biography on Freddie Mercury.
The crazy pair went out to play, according to David, when John was on yet another break from May and far away from Yoko. They genderbender-ed about, John indulging again that 'inner fag' of his. What larks.
They later 'hooked up': 'There was a whore in the middle, and it wasn't either of us,' David smirked. 'At some point in proceedings, she left. I think it was a she. Not that we minded.' By the time they made it back to New York, the ambisextrous pair were 'lifelong friends'.
I’m suspicious of this story for several reasons but first I want to make it clear that none of them have to do with John having sex with men or being bisexual. I’m a very firm believer of John’s bisexuality (my username is literally queerlennon lmao) but once again I think it’s good to examine the legitimacy of sources, even when they favour our position.
Firstly, LAJ’s source for this story is the claim that David told her, which considering I can’t find any info about them being friends besides her word, combined with the fact that she’s lied about having close relationships in the past raises a lot of flags.
But even if we assume LAJ isn’t lying and did know Bowie, the quote is still suspect, particularly the line “John was on yet another break from May and far away from Yoko.” According to May in her book Loving John, her and John had only one break from their relationship (the phrase “yet another break” implies multiple) that lasted a week, and for the entirety of that week, John was with Yoko. (x)
Finally, the language LAJ uses to describe John and David’s sexualities not only puts me on edge but very much makes me question her intention. Phrases like “the genderbender-ed about,” “indulged his ‘inner fag,’” and “ambisextrous,” all come across to me as fetishisation. Bisexuality is already very highly fetishised and sexualised and LAJ is most definitely not concerned with deviating from that representation. That phrasing combined with the way she also discusses Freddie’s sexuality, where she’s alleged highly sexualised claims about him having threesomes:
And quite often that involved other people as well. Other men, other women. There would be a number of them in the bedroom at any given time. In fact they were raided by the police once and the police stormed in and they found more people than they were expecting to find in the bed that morning.
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— leads me to believe that LAJ is an author less concerned with exploring John’s sexuality as apart of his life, something that made him who he was, and more concerned with including details about “bisexual threesomes” as shock value, as a sensational point she can use to to promote her book in press tours and interviews. Like a tabloid writer. And this sort disrespect representation of John’s queerness, imo isn’t that much better than the biographers who dismiss or underplay it. I totally understand that for a lot of us, finding out new info about John’s queer identity is exciting, especially for those of us who are queer and identify with a lot with John for that reason, myself included. But we shouldn’t be giving credence and legitimacy to someone who firstly, isn’t trustworthy and secondly who’s reason for talking about it is gross and exploitative at best and biphobic at worst.
tl;dr, LAJ is an incredibly untrustworthy source of info and in her own over exaggerations, treats discussions of queerness in an extremely problematic and exploitive way so please take anything you read from her with a massive grain of salt.
