A Review of David Giles "Illusions of Immortality. A Psychology of Fame and Celebrity" MacMillan Press, 2000.Introduction - when the winners make it, they are still not happy.
One of the main models for "success" and for "winners" in our society it to be a media celebrity. It is ironic therefore, that when people "make it" into this role, they are very often not at all happy. Indeed the whole industry which markets people as celebrities, the industry which sells news and products, from celebrities to their fans, generates a good deal of frustration and difficulty. This is very clear in a book, written by David Giles on the psychology of fame and celebrity. It deserves to be read and thought about widely - not only by academics interested in media psychology but also by all those concerned with mental health and illness. When it looks at the psychology and relationships of famous people and their fans, as well when it looks at the issues for psychology thrown up by the existence of the mass media, the book touches upon things barely thought about in the mental health and therapeutic services. In this article I try to draw these implications out and explore them more fully.
The Inner and the Outer
Virtually any psychology or therapy book you can think of assumes we live in two zones - an inner and an outer. Having read this book by David Giles I think we would better describe our experience as saying that we live in three zones: the inner, the outer world of direct experience and outer world of media-ted experience.
The psychology textbooks make, or assume, a primary distinction between our experience of our inner selves (the world of internal thoughts, feelings and emotional states, our memories, our pre-existing values, beliefs, learning and orientation about the world, our fantasies and our imaginings - all of which make up what we see as our identities) and the outer world (the world of our day to day perceptions and experiences of people and places, of events and situations). In our flow of awake consciousness we flit backwards and forwards in our awareness between these external and internal realities - a person's frown triggers a self deprecating thought process, a smile or a scent brings back a happy memory, a remark triggers a fantasy of what might be. We live "working at the interface between these two worlds" - adjusting the inner private world of beliefs, skills and ideas as we learn through the experience of life - while intervening and attempting to steer, change and/or move our external worlds - in line with the inner ones (e.g. changing our homes, jobs and relationships in with our aspirations).
For most of the history of the human species the outer worlds of people were what they directly experienced. This would often involve an intense knowledge of a very limited geographical place and a very few people who lived there. Giles quotes estimates that in the Middle Ages the average person only ever saw 100 people in the course of a lifetime. The inner world was largely shaped by the direct experiences of these 100 people and the villages, woods and fields with their flora and fauna.
Indirect experience of other people and places - through the written word
In the last few hundred years humanity has extended its world of experience through indirect access to worlds - through written texts. Before the invention of the printing press, writing and books were a rare insight into other worlds, not directly experienced. Few would, or could, read such hand scribed books. With the invention of the printing press, however, far more people's intellectual horizons widened - and there was a corresponding change in the forms of human consciousness. This might be described as media-ted experience. It is experience communicated through a medium - in this case books, newspapers, pamphlets or magazines.
The effect of writing on human psychology
If I sit down to write an article or a book I am involved in a solitary activity aimed at an almost totally unknown audience - I am addressing people who will read these words in very different times and places, displaced from where I am writing them. (The curtain rail fell off the window when I was opening the curtains and I have yet to put one of my curtains back. In the background while I write there is the sound of my washing machine. I have an appointment later today, which is a Monday. It is 10.20 am according to my computer clock. Now I have come back to re-write the text at 2.00pm. You are unable to know in which order I wrote my text. All these are the contexts of this writing activity - they are normally left out of texts as such details seem irrelevant distractions to your understanding of what I am trying to say. Yet my ability in a text to cut out irrelevant distractions like these, as well as my ability to write at different times, makes this form of communication quite different from spoken, context-bounded real-time speech in everyday life).
This solitary writing activity, which, incidentally, makes my wrists hurt, is very different from talking to someone in the same room, to someone who, perhaps, I know well, whose reactions to what I might say can be immediately perceived. Writing, whether for a mass circulation article or for a private letter, is communication displaced in time and place. As a sit down, sedentary, activity it indirectly creates an awareness of the isolated self creating the stream of words. Writing allows ideas to emerge slowly. It enables one to consider things very carefully, in depth (if one has the patience and is not working to a deadline). It gives rise, moreover, to an awareness of oneself, and one's own mental processes, as an individual, as one writes. In a very different kind of world, the world before printed books, in which ideas emerged out of conversations, out of the group, or where texts and ideas were handed down generation by generation in epics learned by heart, people were not going to think of themselves nearly so much as individuals.
Only when a person goes off on their own to develop their ideas, and brings them back, as a writer does, are they going to be acutely aware of their own, unique place, as "the" creator of those ideas - ideas which are different from the ideas of other people.
Up until the age of the printing press it is to be doubted that people had a clear sense that what passed through their heads were really their "own" thoughts. The idea of "own thoughts", of "owning knowledge" or intellectual copyright would have been bewildering.
Thoughts did not "belong" to people. People would not perceive themselves "creating" their own thought processes. A historian of mental states (Jaynes, J, The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Penguin 1990) has argued persuasively, that "hearing voices" was, for millennia, the normal state of consciousness of people. Put in another way, what "passed through people heads" were not considered their "own" thoughts at all. If people felt impelled to do something that lay outside of the normal pattern then they felt impelled by "God's Will". Thus Martin Luther "Heard the Voice of God" - speaking to his conscience, as he believed it would speak to any and every other individual's conscience. If people were "tempted" (felt a drive or wish to act outside of moral codes) then they understood themselves as being "tempted by the devil". "Hearing the voice of God" and "being tempted by the Devil" were not rhetorical turns of phrase, they were not just archaic figures of speech - these are the literal ways people understood their mental contents - as directed from outside by supernatural beings. A lot of people still understand what is going on inside their heads in this way......
New Media - New Mentalities
Nowadays the printing press has been supplemented by photography and the ability to publish static and then moving pictures, the broadcast media, computers and the Internet. Should we not recognise that this has already creates a further change in mass psychology and what can be considered "normal"?
Our "external realities" now have different faces. There is one kind of outer world that we directly experience and is open to our influence and interaction. This is a world of people and joint activities that we know because we have cuddled them and/or we can touch them, smell their scent perhaps, speak to them. In this world we see and hear people day to day in a living dialogue about practical domestic, emotional and work arrangements in the places we regularly frequent and inhabit. This is the world where we exercise some control and are familiar - or where we can get to know the people who exercise control. I would call this our outer-directly experienced world - in our habitats and familiar places of work and leisure.
Nowadays then there is also a vast world beyond, and in addition to, this external world of "direct" experience. There is a world of moving and static images on bill boards, screens and visual display units, there is the world of photo magazines, text messages, communications, there is a world of broadcast. This is an outer-media-ted world beyond our range of interaction, control or influence. We experience it only indirectly through the aid of mass media, photography and cameras, broadcast and electronic means. What we see and hear is recorded or broadcast from a different geographical place far from where we live, it contains people who we may recognise, who we may read about, whose ideas we may discuss, whose lives may interest us, who do things - but in places we have never been to. We have no access to these people and we do not know them in our own familiar personal world. This media-ted outer world did not exist, or was very underdeveloped, when most of the current theories about mental illness and therapy were being developed. Our relationship to the celebrities and people in this media-ted world is termed "para-social interaction" or PSI. (The term para-social interaction was first coined by D Horton and R Wohl in an article in the journal Psychiatry in 1956).
In many ways the outer-media-ted world has replaced the outer directly experienced world. There has been a going backwards as well as a going forwards. As a child in the 1950s and 1960s I grew up able to roam freely on a disused golf course, in woods and fields, along a canal bank and on the sea front near to where I lived, near Folkestone in Kent. Children are less and less able to live in this free range way. They are cooped up at home because their parents are frightened of traffic dangers and child molestation. They are battery reared - and they watch the TV instead. I cannot see this as progress and suspect it must have a profound effects on the development of the psyche.
Speaking to the TV - Classic Symptoms of Schizophrenia
To most psychiatrists, a sure symptom of serious mental ill health problems is for a person to speak to a TV, as if the people on the TV were directly and uniquely addressing the viewer. Yet here is a description of a fan of the keyboard player, Nick Rhodes, of Duran Duran who describes feelings about magazine photos of Nick Rhodes:
"In these pictures it's like he's looking at you. And that's how I imagine it usually - that he's there and he's looking at me and he can see me and hear me through the magazine...When I stare at one picture for a long time...he's come alive and he's watching me, and he can see and he can move. So I imagine he's here with me all the time and he's watching me all the time. So if I do something I am careful because Nick Rhodes is watching me." (Vermorel and Vermorel "The Fans Speak" quoted on page 138 ).
Of course this fan is aware that this is the working of her(?) own imagination - but her fantasy imagining is obviously powerful. In a powerful imagination state you can argue that "reality" is suspended for a time. In fact we all "suspend" reality in the watching of a good play or a film, or in reading a book, so that we more fully enter into the dramatic experience. When we watch a TV programme the more compelling that we find it, the more we "suspend reality". We say we "really got into it". In this mental state we are living in the fantasy of the script writer as re-created by the cast, the director and the company. We live inside other peoples fantasy and, in a sense, inside their mental constructs. In psychotherapy theory a major place is given over to analysing our individual fantasies. In fact, most of the time, when people are living in fantasies, they are "suspending reality" to more fully live inside the fantasies of other people - often made in Hollywood.
Blurring fiction and real life
We often turn off other distractions to more completely immerse ourselves in the dramatic experience - e.g. turning off the light to watch the TV. In their "para-social relationships" with TV stars it is clear, reading Giles' book, that people can then lose touch with the distinction between fiction and reality. ".....the distinction between soap characters and real-life celebrities may be considerably blurred....Indeed there are numerous reports of soap characters being treated by the general public as though 'in character'. For example, when a character experiences misfortune in a story line, television companies are often besieged with flowers and letters from viewers. It is reported that during the first five years of his appearance in the popular series Marcus Welby M.D., actor Robert Young received over a quarter of a million letters from viewers, asking for medical advice." (p.64). Here are a quarter of a million people who are perhaps not talking to the TV character in the way that a psychotic person might - but they are writing to one in a way that seems, if anything, even more 'out of touch with reality'. Should they, one wonders, receive a visit from a psychiatrist?
As I write this I feel most acutely aware that people who are diagnosed as having mental health problems are usually very isolated and inactive. I think you can construct an explanation for most of schizophrenic psychosis out of the inevitable results of extreme isolation, experiential deprivation and inactivity. When people are very isolated and inactive what they do is day dream - and chronic day dreaming, powerfully amplified by their feelings of disappointment, loneliness and frustration generate fantasies which take over their lives, lives which in any case lack to day to day structure. Yet many of these fantasies are ready made - they are there is there in the TV story lines and there in the pop song lyrics. Every time I had a breakdown I went back to playing the same pop tunes. The same lyrics again and again gave my repeated madnesses a certain continuity of flavour. One might say the electronic recordings helped my madnesses get stuck in the same thought processes again and again. I do not know if this was a good or a bad thing - but it was part of the 'clinical' picture.
Para-social relationships and substitute relationships
Many isolated and inactive people spend a large part of the day in front of the TV. Their relationships are either with care workers or "para -social relationships" with TV personalities - given the want of anyone else to relate to. In their relationship to people and what they are doing on the TV they do not need to "turn off other distractions" for the chief problems in their lives is a deep experiential deprivation in which they have been unable to "get a life". Thus it can be said that they are living a substitute life, vicariously, through the media itself. (Another, even more up to date option, it to live through the characters that they steer, in virtual realities, through computer games....). The clinical psychological consequences have barely been thought about as far as I am aware.
"Some researchers suggest that socially isolated individuals may use television to satisfy their need for actual relationships, and some of the cross cultural research into television viewing behaviour suggests that, especially for women (many of their sample were heavy mid afternoon soap opera viewers) para-social interaction may fill important gaps in social life." (Giles p 64).
Anyone who feels like doubting the real emotional significance of para social relationships of this sort would do well, as David Giles does, to reflect on the emotional effects and uses of pornography. There has been much debate and research about pornography (see my other net essays on this theme.) Here I do not want to go into these - only to point out that, clearly, pornography is used in the context of masturbation. It is an important example of where parasocial interaction are, in some sense, a 'substitute' or 'alternative' for "real" sexual relationships. I suppose one might argue that, where pornography becomes a preferred substitute for a closer "real" relationship, then it might become a factor in which people 'get stuck'. There might be circumstances in which it might drain and neutralise the emotional energy that would otherwise impel the awkward, and sometimes embarrassed, attempts of shy, or withdrawn, people to approach the opposite sex and thereby to form "more fulfilling" relationships - because it is "easier" to masturbate with pornography pictures and/or text than to work through the difficulties and risks of forming a "real relationship".
In writing this I notice that it is ever so difficult to discuss in this whole PSI field without falling into judgmental categories which imply that the "proper" or "right" kind of relationships are the more tangible, closer, two way ones. This is hardly surprising if one values intimacy because all the behaviour associated with "closeness" implies a literal meaning to that word. One speaks of the "warmth" of a relationship, for example, which must surely derive from a literal correspondence to what it "feels" to be in bed together, or at least to be able to literally embrace each other.. One's "feelings" about another person again implies tactility. So it is useful here to remind ourselves of the obvious - to remind ourselves of what cannot be found in a PSI relationship but which can be found in other kinds of relationships. Thus not found in a PSI relationship are "contact", mutual intimacy, tactility, smell, personal recognition, reciprocity, obligation, shared living space and domestic arrangements. When one recognises that contact intimacy - sensitive touch - is crucial to well-being perhaps it is legitimate to claim that if PSI is an "inferior substitute" for closer relationships.
However you look at it, PSI relationships seem to offer "less depth" than "real relationships" and might be a cul de sac substitute for lots of lonely people. On the other hand they might be a stepping stone towards fuller relationships.
"The advantage of parasocial relationships over real ones may be those relating to user control; a parasocial partner does not interact with you, does not let you down, and therefore you have a degree of power in a para social relationship. Your partner may contain all manner of fantasy attributes that may put real potential partners in the shade. Parasocial interaction may provide you with the ideal partner, not only a living being with all the appropriate attributes, but also someone whose every move is scrutinised" (Giles p. 65). So these might be the ideal relationship for the teenager who is still exploring their wish for relationship before taking a step into the real world of relationship - one route to which might be meeting people through a fan club or through attending clubs and concerts which a pop idol plays at.
Fan and Star Behaviour - A Structural Generator of Frustration
What perhaps matters here will be, among other things, the response of parents to fan behaviour. I can imagine how the sort of "sensible", up tight parents, who rigidly control their children, might get very uptight about fan style behaviour by their offspring towards particular pop stars or movie idols. I can imagine different kinds of parents differing very widely in how they might react to a Boy George fan, met by David Giles, who estimated that she had " 11, 740 replications of her idol in her possession - pictures, posters, badges, photographs - and that she spent up to £100 each week on magazines and clothes from the Boys' shop......She and her friends had moved near to London so that they could be near their hero, often making pilgrimages to his house, and had renounced their former friends: 'We all moved away from our school friends and things like that, and now I don't think I've got any friends that are not Boy George fans.' This is more like the entry into a religious cult than a passing 'teen phase.'" (Giles p 133-134). Perhaps what is happening here, as with many cults, political, religious or media-cultural, is the discovery of a 'new family' bound together with a common language and obsession, not shared by the outside world. Such new families might be a place of flight from the old family - with its "same old row, again and again" (to quote a lyric from the Who).
In his book Giles has an interesting section on "stalking" - having "entered into a relationship" with the star the fan wants yet more - they want to actually get to know them and enter into a more tangible relationship. They then start acting on that wish in a way which becomes irksome and possibly dangerous to the star - particularly if they are projecting their own hang ups onto the star and getting more and more frustrated and angry by being avoided and ignored. There is, in fact, a research area here, as forensic psychiatrists have tried to understand the difference between an "ordinary fan" and "stalkers" in order to be able to more accurately identify stalkers and reduce the risks to celebrities. The results of the research do not seem very deep. What distinguishes the ordinary fan and a stalker is that the latter is unable to counter their (inappropriate fantasies) with a "realistic assessment". (p143-144).
Unlike the Middle Ages when a person only ever saw a hundred people the structural relationships of stardom and fandom in mass (marketing) society seem set up to generate emotional frustration for fan and star alike. The creation of celebrities by the mass media is a machine which destroys mental well being. Whatever "gifts" or skills they have the star is only another ordinary human being. The desire of fan to meet and know them is on the one hand the expression of a quite ordinary wish for human relationship, sociability and communication - yet it is at the same time quite impossible to fulfil in an ordinary way. I once wrote a review of a book by Fritjof Capra, a star in the academic world, and put a lot of work into it - because I thought that this book was both incredibly illuminating in fields I was unfamiliar with, but also very weak in fields that Capra was clearly unfamiliar with. I wanted to communicate and wrote to him with my review. I got a standard printed postcard back which told me all about his plans and regretted he could not communicate with all people who wrote to him. Rationally I can understand this response and I left it at that. Yet I cannot deny felt frustrated and, even, humiliated. I was just one of hundreds or thousands. I felt put in my place. Yet if I were in Capra's shoes I would also probably feel frustrated by this. I could understand not only getting angry with paparazzi, invading my privacy, but with fans themselves, if they started demanding something that was impossible - an unrealistic expectation that I devoted time and a relationship to each one individually. It is no wonder then that some stars smash up hotel rooms and resort to drugs. Giles shows what everyone knows, that stardom can be a nightmare - indeed he is interested in special counselling and mental health assistance for new stars.
Fanatical fans - modelling yourself on your idol
For fans too the effects are often a reduction in mental well being. What Giles does, for me, although this is not an intention of his book, is to show that what is, in some contexts, seen as psycho pathological behaviour, is, in other context, normal fan behaviour. The word fan is related to the word fanatic - and derives from the Latin, fanaticus, which means, literally "belonging to the temple". The relation of the fan to the idol is one in which the fan fashions their behaviour to their view of their idol and the relationship often has quasi religious features. Giles quotes a fan of the film star Deanna Durbin, "I adored her and my adoration influenced my life a great deal. I wanted to be as much like her as possible, both in my manner and my clothes....If I found myself in an annoying or aggravating situation, which I previously dealt with in an outburst of temper, I found myself wondering what Deanna would do and modified my own reactions accordingly." (from Tudor, A. "Image and Influence. Studies in the Sociology of Film." George Allen and Unwin, 1974).
I have had therapy before but I can never recall discussing my relationship to media or fictional characters with a therapist. I have never heard of a therapist discussing para social relationships but, if people find effective means to control their temper my modelling themselves on film stars, it makes me wonder why not. The quote from the Deanna Durbin fan suggests that a lot of people learn coping and behavioural styles, essentially, by copying acted roles and performance styles. To grow up, it seems, is for many people to choose which stars to model themselves on, and which lead roles to aspire to in the drama of life. The world is no longer, as Shakespeare had it, a stage with individuals as players strutting about it - it is far more a film set, or the setting for a TV drama - preferably in a warmer climate....in Disneyworld or Los Angeles perhaps, sponsored by Tommy Hilfinger (whoever he is).
One of the interesting insights in Giles book is the way that people who strive for celebrity status have often themselves first served a sort of psychological apprenticeship as fans. Their model for being human is someone they idolise - and then they move to try to become that kind of person themselves. This is by no means merely a feature of the media age. The person who strives to "become immortal" is often emulating the deeds of their own heroes. Thus Alexander the Great saw himself following in the footsteps of legendary heroes of Greek mythology. Meanwhile, closer to home, and closer to our own time "As with Alexander the Great, Ronnie Kray was, first and foremost a fan: 'for years his dream-life had been people with successful gangsters, boxers, military men.' To his collection of heroes he could now start to add the exploits of himself and Reggie, immortalised at last in the pages of the East London Advertiser for assault on a police officer. The twins kept a scrap book in which this, and later exploits, were collected along with reports and photographs of their boxing triumphs." (Giles p 28). Perhaps this is why the Krays received such a following and sympathy among other show business celebrities. Whatever the Krays did, their psychology was identified with by others who were very much on the same fandom/stardom wavelength. Such people cannot conceive of a "dream life" which is not also acted out publicly. Such celebrities, as Giles shows, can get away with quite a lot. If they smash up their hotel rooms they are not sectioned under the Mental Health Act, their fame grows and their manager pays the damages bill.
Manic Depression - gifted children pursuing centre stage glory
Although Giles does not discuss it, I think it can be argued, that the desire for fame can underpin mental health problems in several different ways. As I have argued elsewhere I think it can be argued that the underlying motivation that impels and creates manic depression is a desire for glory. For the manic depressive person there is a need to be 'centre stage' - literally and/or metaphorically. The manic person is intensely excited at the idea that fame and fortune is near if only they can work (yet) harder to draw more people into recognising and following their grandiose plans and supposed grand achievements. I once gave a talk on this to the Manic Depression Fellowship in which I suggested that an underlying therapeutic idea in the "cure" of manic depression was "overcoming the desire for personal glory". This is what I got from Alice Millers book "The Drama of the Gifted Child" many years before. One way you can see manic depression is that it is a mental illness that has a cultural dimension - it is partly rooted in society's celebration of "brilliant achievers" and the legions of artists etc. who suffer from MD can be said to be impelled by a craving for that celebrated status.
In the therapeutic approach what a person might crave is a desire for recognition which they attach to the performance principle - because as a child they were chiefly seen and got parental attention (the closest they get to affection) when they performed - and they end up performing for their rest of their lives. Their basic way of relating to others is structured around the performance principle and the need for recognition becomes the core of their personality. Such people typically muddle the idea of being loved, with being admired and with being celebrated for achievement. Perhaps they have been left with a craving for unconditional affection left over from infancy which was inadequately satisfied at that time. Then, when fame and stardom is attained such people find that they have not been satisfied emotionally. This is because it was not what was really craved anyway. Indeed, as Giles book shows, the stars may end up yet more lonely - because they are even less able to form trusting and ordinary relationships as they are surrounded, either by sycophants, by people on the make, or by people who are jealous of them.
One can envisage variants on this theme - one variant might be when a person is the darling of the family and is habituated to performance for praise - so that when they leave home, they try to reproduce this basic life game with everyone else and turn them into audiences. But there are other scenarios too including people who are only noticed by parents etc. when they perform - which might make the phenomena somewhat more desperate and perhaps more "pathological".
Attention seeking and stardom
On the psychiatric ward (and in ordinary life) it's a very common phenomena for people to be "attention seeking". If this happens in everyday life, as a "game a person is playing", it can be very irritating for other people. When one is trying to do things in a group and one of the "team" is obviously "trying to make a name for themselves" the others in the group will probably experience it as disruptive and distressing. The person trying to make a name for themselves feels they are above the others. They are experienced as competitive. This can lead to their rejection/ostracisation by the group for reasons they might not understand. (They may misunderstand the others as cold shouldering them because the others are jealous - and/or unwilling to acknowledge their unique genius and insights). As this is a form of acting/relating they are unconscious of, it frequently happens that others, out of politeness and embarrassment, try to ignore being forced into the role of admiring audience. After a point, however, it becomes impossible to ignore any more the irritating egotist and rows break out.....
If a person needs to perform, needs to be centre stage and needs an audience - then perhaps it is better that they become pop stars, actors and actresses, or pursue sports activities. They might gravitate to professions where they can naturally perform in front of others - or where competition is taken for granted as the normal relationship style.....Then they either come top and find fame or, if and when they do not go to the top, then they may eventually receive a diagnosis of personality disorder perhaps, or manic depression.... What I am saying here again is that clinical psychological phenomena is closely related to the topic area.
Recognition for ones work as feedback - recognition for oneself as fame
This by no means exhausts this topic area. It is worth looking at the whole issue of the distinction between recognition and fame. There are more issues to be teased out here because creativity does not per se, derive from, of attach itself to, a desire for performance and display. The creative impulse is a motivation in its own right with its own satisfactions. The psychology of fame cannot be separated from the psychology of creativity when people become famous for their achievements. (It is ironic that Anthony Storr, for example, should write a book called "The School of Genius" which is about the psychology of very creative people and that, later, he should change the title to "Solitude". The connection between creativity and social and interpersonal relationship is complex. To Storr it is often the case that one needs long periods on one's own, without distraction, to create - and, the other way round, isolated people often find their means to a satisfying life in and through their creativity. It seems to me to be at least possible to be able to believe that people might want to make beautiful and moving music, or to be able to act in a way that moves people, out of a creative impulse, out of an aesthetic and emotional sensibility - without that being inevitably bound up in a craving for becoming a public star. Indeed the creativity might be possible and bound up with solitude and then turned upside down with fame.
There is, it seems to me, a difference between a desire of recognition for oneself and a desire of recognition for one's work. In most fields of activity, if one has no recognition for one's work, one not only has no income, but no information that would lead to improvement. Criticism and praise is a means of orientation that enables to say whether one is on target or not. (Criticism is more valuable than praise in this respect as it provides food for improvement - where praise does not). This is feedback - and it seems to me that a creative person can want feedback without that being quite the same as craving "fame". Fame may, indeed, get in the way of feedback, because one is surrounded by insincere flatterers who have their own agenda. Feedback is about the work. Fame is about the creator of the work. They are not the same.
Giles writes about the inevitable celebrity status that comes with creativity which might be true for acting and music stars where one must have a direct audience to actually do the job but it is not true in the same way for a whole variety of arts and intellectual activities where the creative activity has to be in, large part, in isolation rather than in front of an audience. In these cases the fame comes later (if at all). In his book, the "Consolations of Philosophy" Alain de Botton describes how the philosopher Schopenhauer, after a lifetime in obscurity, finally became famous in his mid sixties. 'After one has spent a long life in insignificance and disregard, they come at the end with drums and trumpets and think that is something' was his response. He ends his life worrying less about being nibbled by worms in his grave than by what other philosophy professors will now do to his works. Creation in isolation, carries with it the possibility that one will not be 'recognised' at all and this means that one will not actually communicate with anyone. It then carries the opposite risk that recognition may mean one loses control over the presentation of one's own ideas, being diluted and misinterpreted by one's disciples and critics.
Artists in Garrets
In the case of the writer, artist and scientist the craving for recognition may have a different character. People may want media attention as proof that it has all been worth while.. It is only worth while if one's work communicates. The point about fame and creativity is relevant I think to the typical 'artist starving in a garret scenario', the ones that are not discovered until after they are dead - the Van Goughs of this world. It's possible to argue, for example, that Van Gough first went mad, when Gaugin walked away from him after rowing about their art, and his brother Theo became more preoccupied with his new wife. Thus Van Gough was totally and utterly alone - a creative person living at the opposite extreme to fame in the best conditions for madness you can ask for - to create and be entirely unrecognised for what they are doing. The critic of Freud and of psychotherapy, Jeffrey Masson, (who I once heard speak in Sheffield), says in one of his books that if you read virtually any modern biography the thing that most people find most difficult to bear is when they are saying or doing things which are important to them - but which they cannot get anyone else at all to be interested in, or recognise. So I think the need for recognition - as feedback and communication - is not necessarily the same as a craving for fame. The need for recognition arises so that, an activity which may inevitably be solitary, can be felt to have been worthwhile. Einstein became famous - but I doubt whether he was seeking fame. He was seeking the recognition for relativity theory. Had he not received this recognition his work would have been futile and in vain. Once he got it, however, fame was an inevitable by-product, which was not the thing craved for (he was, I think, a very modest man).
The Future
Much of Giles work is about the effects of the pop industry and celebrities created by the broadcast and music media industries. Yet it stimulates me to think of the way in which computers and computer communications, the Internet, will produce new forms of psychological life, and new forms of psychopathology again. Pedophiles in Internet chat rooms is a high profile problem but there are probably of plenty less obvious ones. At least part of the problem may be peoples inability to understand each other. A half of the world have never even used a telephone, let alone Internet. Between generations in the industrialised world there is a cavernous gulf, for example, between those older people who never grew up with computers. I have never played any computer games of note and I suspect very few clinical psychologists have. Yet I suspect that virtual reality computer games have, or will have, as profound a formative effect on people's imagination and inner worlds as ever Hollywood has. The problem is that, to the extent that there might be psychological dangers (and positives), who can keep up with the pace of change to assess them? Again we are long past the stage in which the Internet was a place of static or moving pornographic images. The potential for interactive marketed sex, at a distance, is being developed. What will be the effects on people's more normal sexual relationships and on their mental health? Who knows! Is anybody even looking at this?
In conclusion - the new normal psyche of the electronic age
I have gone into fields not really examined by Giles book which does not go very far in looking at clinical psychological questions. In so doing, however, I have by no means exhausted the way in which the media has changed the way we understand ourselves and therefore the approaches to mental health and mental illness.
Many have been in this field before. In so far as the media, together with the marketing industry and the PR machine, creates a generalised cultural picture of what is supposed normal, as well as creating a picture of the life styles to be aspired for, it has been accused of having a part in all manner of ills and psychological problems.. I notice there is a debate on eating disorders, for example, that, at the time of writing, is being organised by the UK Institute of Psychiatry. Presumably it will be argued that generations of young girls set their sights on figures like those of super models. Then again there is a whole debate about the stereotyping and stigmatisation of people who have had mental health problems by the media.. On a more general level numberless texts have called attention to the way in which the marketing industry systematically associates real human needs and aspirations with false ones. There is everywhere a plague of loneliness - but the sellers of Bacardi rum know how to help us make friends. If we buy their product we can bask lazily with our news friends in a boat off a Caribbean island. There is everywhere a total lack of freedom - yet if we buy a new car we can smash up the house and drive off to wherever we want. There is a lack of peace and tranquility - and we can buy the latest bathroom accoutrements.
The workings of the media on mental health are powerfully intertwined with the marketing. In other writings about how to interpret the thought processes of a psychotic person, based on my own experience, I have argued that
" To interpret mad thinking - think like an advertiser. To the mad person objects come to function as symbols with personal meanings. But how can one decide these meanings? The interpretation is often not really that difficult. The highly personal reading of the everyday world of the mad person mostly uses associations that would not surprise advertisers. Adverts deliberately use emotionally associative ways of thinking. I would always smoke when mad because madness had associations of being grown up. But not only that - if I was in a new setting I would smoke Embassy. If I felt the need to feel powerful I would smoke Superkings or Samson, if I wanted to detach myself from the spider webs of commitment and obligation that other people seemed to be trying to put on me, I would smoke Silk Cut to magically cut the spider's web. Of course you were invincible if you smoked an Invincible cigar." (Brian Davey, Meaning, Madness and Recovery - also on my web site).
In other words the perfect target for the advertising industry would be the insane - if only they had enough money to be worthwhile customers. When insane people eat Bounty bars, bought in the asylum cigarette and tuck shop, they have just the mental attitude envisaged by the marketing psychologists - fantasies about tropical islands, coconuts and the free and easy life style. Of course, people do not principally smoke to get a nicotine hit, they smoke to profile themselves on Humphrey Bogarde and Loran Bacall - what is happening when people smoke are the reflection of these para- social relationship, modelling ourselves in the stars. People smoke because it is part of their dream life - they are dreaming of a life style once made in Hollywood.
What is called modern life is, in short, sleep walking in mass marketed dreams.
Brian Davey
March 2001
© BRIAN DAVEY