Michael+Jackson

 __**Personality Assessment of Michael Jackson**__  **//by, Kevin Fiori//**  **Biography**  Michael Jackson was born in Gary, Indiana on August 29th 1958. He was the seventh out of nine children, and from a very young age he had a knack for music, as did almost everyone in his family. His father, Joe Jackson, used this as a way to live out his dream of becoming a famous musician. Joe use to be an aspiring guitarist, but had to put it all aside in order to support his family. Along with four of Michael’s older brothers, Joe placed Michael at the helm of a family musical group called the Jackson Five. They became very famous through amateur performances until they got a big break with Motown Records. Becoming this good, and this popular, was a lot of hard work for such young performers, especially for Michael. At the time they started performing he was only five years old. The initiative for this hard work probably wouldn’t have been there if it wasn’t for Joe Jackson. He made sure the five boys were always practicing, performing, and staying in line. As The Jackson Five became more famous, with songs like “ABC” and “The Love You Save,” Michael grew older, and he started to pull away from the rest. By age thirteen Michael began to put out solo albums such as “Ben” and “I’ll Be There,” which were essential to boosting his career as a performer. After many years together as The Jackson Five, and later as just The Jacksons, the group finally fell off the radar, however Michael’s solo career was only beginning. Over the next thirty years, Michael put out albums like, “Off The Wall”, “Triumph”, “Thriller” and many more which drove him to stardom, and earned him the title, “King of Pop.” However, being this popular and in the spotlight for almost his entire life allowed for the public to know everything there was to know about Michael, and witness his gradual change over the years. Whether we are talking about his musical talent, his physical appearance, or his personal life and intimate relationships; everything was aired out. **Psychoanalytic Perspective** Michael never enjoyed talking about his childhood especially when it came to his father. In most interviews he couldn’t even bare to think of the pain he went through as a child. He would either break down and cry at the thought of it all, or speak to the interviewer with a short but sweet response. As he did in 1993 during an interview on the Oprah Winfrey show, “He (my father) was very strict, very hard, very stern. Just a look would scare you.” Then the subject was quickly changed. Even though Michael himself avoided the thought of his childhood, a lot is known about it. Joe Jackson was a very harsh disciplinary. Joe was known to threaten and sometimes execute beatings and whippings if the children played the wrong note, or were tired of playing the same thing over and over. While his authority over the family did have a fantastic outcome as far as the quality of musical performers, it’s unfortunate to say that he probably scarred Michael for the rest of his life. Looking at Michael through the eyes of a psychoanalytical psychologist like Freud for example, we can see some red flags that may have contributed to the person Michael became later in his life. First of all, lets look at the balance between a person’s Id, Ego, and Superego. The Id is your desires, what you want to actually do before the constrictions of society don’t allow this. Your Superego is those societal rules, and in children’s cases, parental controls. And the Ego is the balance between the two. As a child Michael simply wanted to be like everyone else. He just wanted to play baseball, go to school, ride his bike and be a real kid. Furthermore, he didn’t want to be this “big nosed, dark skinned kid” outcast solely because of his biological features. These were Michaels desires, his Id. On the opposite end of the scale was Michael’s father, who enforced stern judgment on everything Michael did. He wasn’t allowed to do many of the things he wanted; he was enslaved into his music with the promise that at some point it will all be worth it. Beyond his father’s dictatorship, was the racial prejudice Michael had to endure. Michael didn’t see the difference between him and white children; he just wanted everyone to get along. However he was constantly teased about his appearance not only by friends but even his own family. So in order for a child to power through these opposing wants and restrictions the Ego would normally come into play. You would find a way to cope. Michael leaned on his music and tended to just follow his fathers orders, because at the time he was so young he didn’t know any better. Sadly for Michael, not finding his true balance and not coping with his struggles in a healthier manner, gives strong evidence to why as an adult he was still trying to fulfill those childhood desires. The most obvious being that he actually built an amusement park in his own home, and invited children to come play with him. And if that doesn’t seem excessive, he went through multiple surgeries to change the color of his skin, change the shape of his facial features and even scale down the size of his hips.  Another part of Michael’s struggles can be explained through his lingering between the phallic stage and the latency stage. As Michael grew up he seemed to never really fit into a certain category of sexuality. I’m not saying he was gay, straight or even confused, I just think the category he was in was all its own. With his flamboyant, narcissistic attitude towards himself, and his clear inability to love anyone but his own children, we can see there must have been some sort of disconnect earlier in life that affected his character. Again the blame can be put on his father. Michael and his siblings have mentioned in interviews that their father wouldn’t allow them to go on dates or hang around girls. Joe believed that this would compromise their rise to the top, and he didn’t want to take that chance. When it comes to Michael’s problems, the latency stage highlights his father’s boundaries once again. Michael was never allowed to form any true friendships, because his father told him that anyone trying to be his friend was simply trying to use him to get to his money or steal his fame. Again we can see later in life that Michael never could form any ordinary relationships. His closest friends included; Bubbles the monkey, child star Emanuel Lewis, Elizabeth Taylor who was twice Michaels age, and his own children. In order to fully understand Michael through a psychoanalytical perspective, we need to look at one final aspect, his defense mechanism. The way Michael seemed to cope with all the problems was through regression. Michael was not simply trying to seek out the things that he missed out on as a child; he actually was living his life in the mindset of a child. Famous doctor Deepak Chopra has agreed with this theory saying that, “Michael is stuck in the mind of an 11 year old.” Michael named his estate the Never Land Ranch, and has said himself “I’ll always be Peter Pan at heart.” This is clearly referring to the idea that Michael believes he will never grow up and will be a child forever. **Neo-analytic Perspective** According to the psychoanalytic perspective, Michael’s battle with a lost childhood has proven to be a very large reason for his behavior later in life. But lets look at him from a different angle; a Neo-analytic perspective. At the same time that his father wasn’t allowing him to do anything he wanted, and wasn’t letting him be who he wanted to be, he was putting a strong hold on Michael. Alfred Alder would argue that Michaels father was holding him back causing him to feel inferior, and not only to his father, but to everyone around him. Even though he had a phenomenal voice, creative dance moves and good looks, he felt that he wasn’t good enough. I mean it doesn’t seem that hard to believe since his father literally would put him down, even when he was having one of his best performances. He also had a sense of organ inferiority, he thought that his physical features like his skin color, the shape of his nose, or the size of his hips were preventing him from being liked, and therefore making him feel his features were inferior to others. So through out his life the changing of his appearance was a coping strategy, he was trying to make himself feel more accepted and equal to everyone else. This feeling of inferiority has affected him socially as well. Once again, because of his father’s strict demands Michael wasn’t able to form healthy relationships as a child. So as an adult it became very hard for him to form more complex relationships. This could explain why many of his friendships and companions were either children or sometimes animals. Unlike adults, children and animals are a lot more excepting and easier to become close with, so by surrounding himself with people at a similar or lower level of reciprocation he allowed himself to feel more comfortable, and less inferior. Clearly Michael suffered from an inferiority complex, and with the spotlight on him and all the praise he got from the public, he still felt as if he wasn’t doing enough to make everyone happy, including himself.  Another aspect of the neo-analytic approach we can look at is Erikson’s stage theory. According to Erikson, Michael’s problems would have started in early childhood. His feelings of will power and control over his body would have been compromised by his father’s physical abuse. He would essentially feel that everything he did was inadequate including his physical appearance. Now because early childhood stage was compromised, so will every following stage. In middle childhood, where you would normally learn to deal with initiative and guilt, it was nearly impossible for Michael. How can you develop any initiative if you constantly have someone controlling actions and making all your decisions for you; which is exactly what Joe Jackson’s did. In Michael’s case the next stage is one of the most important. This stage happens in late childhood and links his feelings of inferiority to his comparison with other children in school. The missing link here is that for most of Michael’s late childhood he was on the road performing and wasn’t in a normal school setting around his peers. He did have tutors and a lot of interpersonal contact, however it was mostly with adults. As a result he really couldn’t compare himself to his peers, so later in life when these connections to others needed to be made, he was lacking this key characteristic that most people develop way earlier. Another important stage for Michael was during his teenage years. Here he was supposed to be finding his identity. The problem here was he was standing right in the middle of stardom. And even though by this point in his life he had already got rid of his biggest antagonist, his father, there were now producers, agents, and record companies taking that place. Michael couldn’t find out who he was because everyone was telling him who he had to be; who his fans expected him to be. Now the next stage was during the start of his adulthood, where he should have finally found those few quality relationships that he could have some intimacy with, or even love. Unfortunately because he never was allowed to build the skills needed to acquire this type of relationship it became a struggle. We could see this with his short-lived celebrity marriage to Lisa Marie Presley. Basically Michael was trying to fill this gap in his identity. However it wasn’t completely genuine because he wasn’t capable of loving someone like everyone else in the world. Presley admitted this in an interview with Oprah Winfrey. -- "Do you think he (Michael) loved you?" Winfrey asked. "It's hard for me to answer that question. I don't know the answer to that" Presley said. <span style="color: #262626; font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">"Do you think that he loved you as much as he could?" Winfrey asked. <span style="color: #262626; font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; line-height: 200%;">"Yes, as much as he was capable of loving somebody," Presley said. -- <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; line-height: 200%;">The last stage for Michael was in the middle of his adulthood. This is the point where a person is meant to expose their caring and generative qualities. Michael actually seemed to do this, in the 1990’s Michael came out with his “Heal the World” campaign. He did concerts and performances to raise money for the starving children across the globe. In fact this is around the same time Michael had his own children. Now my big concern about this stage is how he got there. If every other stage was so out of whack, how was this once so perfect? My first explanation would be publicity. Michael gave up trying to figure himself out, and simply started pretending to be everything he was supposed to be. My second explanation would be that he was still stuck in that childhood stage. Most children have caring qualities, they tend to except everyone, not see the harm in people, and want to be fair and altruistic. So maybe he was still living out that aspect of his identity, only now he had the means to do it on a much larger scale. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; line-height: 200%;">** Discussion ** <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">Both the Psychoanalytical and Neo-analytical perspective give grave evidence to who Michael Jackson really was behind the mask of his musical popularity. Over the course of his life he developed a great talent as a performer, unfortunately that came at a very high cost. He lost his confidence, his identity, and became dormant in a constant state of childhood. Michael definitely tried to challenge the situation he was falling deeper and deeper into. It becomes obvious with lyrics from songs like __Man in the Mirror__, “I'm starting with the man in the mirror, I'm asking him to change his ways, and no message could have been any clearer, if you wanna make the world a better place take a look at yourself and make a change” You can see that he wants to make a change in not only his life but also the lives of others. Others songs preach iconic words like “It don’t matter if your Black or white” from his song __Black or White__ where he tries to battle racism and show people that there is no difference between him and the rest of the world. Both theories agree that most of the blame can be placed on Michaels father Joe Jackson. Not only for his physical and verbal dehumanization of his children, but also for the simple fact that he placed them into a situation that they didn’t want to be in, and then abandoned them. All in all Michael just wanted to be a normal guy, he wanted to be happy, be loved, and have friends, the little things most people take for granted. “People think they know me, but they don't. Not really. Actually, I am one of the loneliest people on this earth. I cry sometimes, because it hurts. It does. To be honest, I guess you could say that it hurts to be me.” - Michael Jackson

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; line-height: 200%;">**References** <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; line-height: 200%; text-indent: -0.25in;">- Randy, J. (2009). Michael Jackson: the magic, the madness, the whole story, 1958 – 2009. Grand Central Pub. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; line-height: 200%; text-indent: -0.25in;">- Friedman, H., Schustack, M. (2008) Personality: classic theories and modern research. Allyn & Bacon <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; line-height: 200%; text-indent: -0.25in;">- Jackson, M. (1987) Man in the Mirror : Bad <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; line-height: 200%; text-indent: -0.25in;">- Jackson, M. (1991) Black or White : Dangerous <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; line-height: 200%; text-indent: -0.25in;">- Oprah Winfrey Show, Interview with Michael Jackson (1993) <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; line-height: 200%; text-indent: -0.25in;">- Oprah Winfrey Show, Interview with Lisa Marie Presley (2005) <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; line-height: 200%; text-indent: -0.25in;">- News of the World, Michael Jackson Secret Never Land Tapes (http://www.worldstarhiphop.com/videos/video.php?v=wshhLH88Nr59wa430dEY)

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;">