Icon no 7: Tupac Shakur

(Rapper, writer, actor: 16/6/71 - 13/9/96)

Part A

“We were sad children. Some people say that ‘we were poor, but we were happy’. But we couldn’t say that.”³ (Sekyiwa Shakur, Tupac’s sister)

Tupac Shakur was nominated for seven Grammy awards – three of them after his death. He was awarded two Soul Train awards and one MOBO award. He has a star on the Hollywood Boulevard Walk of Fame and is also in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He released 11 studio albums, selling more than 75 million records. Tupac’s most successful singles included California Love, Keep Ya Head Up and 2 of Americaz Most Wanted. He appeared in nine feature films including Gridlock’d, Gang Related and Above the Rim. Tupac became the king of the gangsta rap genre, heavily associated with its ‘thug’ lifestyle. Although the career of Tupac Shakur was cut short by his murder, he remains a defining figure of the rap genre as a whole.

As a white English blogger, I feel cautious writing about this black American born into the racial marginalisation landscape of the 1970s. His story is loaded with prejudice and racism, and I don’t know what that was like. But I want to look at a diverse group of icons in this blog because psychological theory predicts they will have some specific things in common. The map of narcissism I am using predicts overwhelming childhood experiences of condemnation and emotional neglect, together with powerful lessons in how to use performance and admiration as a way to escape. In the list of performing icons I have described in this blog, the earliest is the comic actor /director Charles Chaplin (see post) born in the 1880s. What if Chaplin, king of the silent screen, shared a similar profile of childhood experiences with this king of gangsta rap?

In the narcissistic world of music, the gangsta rap video genre is full of grandiosity, power and confidence. For Tupac Shakur, king of this genre, is there evidence that his persona of confidence and charisma hid the low self-esteem and shame that narcissism theory predicts? If this is the case, how exactly does it work that sadness and condemnation lead to charisma and success, and in Tupac’s case, back again to sadness and a death sentence?

The map of narcissism²*

Heroes and revolutionaries

The Black Panther movement in the 1960s often used the name ‘Shakur’ – referring to the Arabic phrase meaning ‘thanks to God’.

Afeni Shakur (born Alice Williams) had grown up in part as a street child, despite there being money on her father’s side of the family. During the era of the Klu Klux Klan, as power and condemnation became evermore tangible and crucial currencies, Afeni from the age of six was the object of various forms of racism in North Carolina. Morning after morning, racial abuse would be “shot straight into Alice’s psyche like daggers”³. And so, if they had not done so before, extreme experiences of judgment and denigration entered the Williams family. Whilst she was still ‘Alice’, in her hometown there was a stand-off with the Klu Klux Klan later dubbed the ‘Battle of Hayes Pond’. There was also violence at home – between her father and her mother.

Afeni Shakur speaking at a rally

After moving to New York, a school counsellor encouraged Afeni to apply to the High School of Performing Arts. She got a place but was marginalised and judged by the richer white majority. She turned to alcohol, then cannabis, and then, for a place to belong, an offshoot of the New York Disciples Gang. Through her first husband Lumumba Afeni was introduced to the Black Panthers political movement, started going to meetings and over time, became a passionate and vocal black revolutionary. Afeni’s intellectual strength in communicating was quickly recognised.

Disaster struck Afeni when, along with 20 comrades she was arrested on charges of conspiring to commit acts of terrorism. Released on bail, she became pregnant by another panther, Billy Garland, Tupac’s father. Afeni had previously miscarried, and this pregnancy would be subject to prison conditions. But the pregnancy went to term, and a boy was born against the odds. Afeni would later remember,

“I knew, my gut knew, something about this child: that he was supposed to be here. And he was! And he was strong, and he was beautifully spirited and just the prettiest smile in the world”¹

“Where did you learn to perform like that?” This was not a question aimed at Afeni’s unborn son. The person asking was juror number nine after Afeni’s closing speech led to not guilty verdicts on all charges. In the high-stakes-or-bust pattern that we associate with Tupac, Afeni had insisted on representing herself in court with no legal training – studying fastidiously the speeches of Fidel Castro and other historical figures. Her co-defendants had pleaded with her to appoint a lawyer. But Afeni brought a powerful persona to court in both dress sense and manner. She cross examined ‘Yedwa’ - the member of her own Black Panther chapter who had turned out to be Ralph White, an under-cover NYPD officer. When two co-defendants jumped bail, Afeni was placed back on remand, but rather than submit to a strip search she chose the alternative: solitary confinement with its rats. This eight-months-pregnant woman was not out buying baby clothes. Her closing speech asked the jury to judge “according to the way that you want to be judged”³. Her performance took her from condemnation to admiration and fame.

From solitary confinement Afeni wrote a poem: From the Pig Pen which was published in the Black Panthers’ newspaper. Condemnation, defiance, performance, powerful intellectual and physical energy and poetry. The stage was set for her first baby Tupac to be born.

Tupac Amaru was the name of the last Sapa Inca of the final surviving part of the South American Inca Empire – pursued for months until he was caught and brutally executed by the Spanish in 1572.

Looking back at the map of narcissism, we can see that even whilst Tupac was in the womb themes were emerging of judgment, condemnation and (as a way to escape from these) a reliance on performance and intellect.

Seen and yet unseen

In the 2020s we are now beginning to learn about how the trauma of racism can get passed down generations – affecting everything from psychological coping strategies to housing to physical health. We are beginning to understand how attachment trauma (see theory post) impacts a new generation through parents whose own trauma has not been dealt with. In this black family in 70s America some of the traumatic experiences in the background are documented. Fighting this as best she could, Afeni was determined to “give her son a sense of racial pride and personal security”¹. In her mind, her son would need to come out fighting. Whilst there was validity to this in Afeni’s own experience, Tupac was also a baby. He needed, before being a political and social soldier, to be a baby. Was Afeni ready to be a mother? Was she ready to wait to find out what kind of individual her son wanted to be? In her mind, such ideas were perhaps a luxury in a context of a kind of war.

Ready or not, in herself, for motherhood, the life set before Afeni was not a secure one. She had just powerfully found a voice, a role and recognition of her strengths. She began speaking at universities and campaigning against prejudiced FBI surveillance practices. When a publicist later spent some time with Afeni during the 1990s, she described Tupac’s mother as “amazing”. There was a “palpable sense of Tupac’s revolutionary pedigree”¹. Afeni was a performer – a rebellious politician. But as the Black Panther Party started to fall apart, she began to drink and became gradually addicted to crack cocaine – a substance that was starting to devastate the poorest sections of America. None of this fitted well with the emotional needs of an infant boy.

Tupac’s emotional needs were not only neglected through Afeni’s absence. As the oldest child, a young Tupac found himself confided in by his mother. At the age of 17, he spoke about this on a home-made video:

“It was like I was given responsibility before I wanted it, and so I can’t really differentiate what great responsibility is because I’ve had it for so long”¹

Tupac’s cousin summarised that,

“…the adults they were so into what they believed in that there wasn’t a whole lot of attention placed on us children.”³

What does the map of narcissism say about a child being given too much emotional responsibility? I think it says that a child being treated as an adult is having their childhood emotional vulnerability dismissed – most often not intentionally but perhaps in repeated moments of desperation or absence of a sense of such boundaries of parenting. On the other hand, biographer Dyson notes that in the ghetto, “what you don’t know can kill you”¹. Afeni was not faced with exactly the same boundary dilemmas as the middle-class white mother a few blocks away.

As Tupac approached 18, his mother’s crack addiction was causing him more and more distress. Biographer Staci Robinson (who knew the family as a teenager) focusses on the disappointment Tupac might have felt seeing his “hero” become disillusioned and weak (he wrote “When your Hero Falls from Grace about Afeni). I can see this disappointment, but the map of narcissism focusses on something else: was his mother a somewhat distant hero, and not so much a parent? Again, where is the mother paying attention to the boy’s feelings and desires? We think of the adult Tupac as someone with such a strong identity. But developmental psychology says the child needs to be seen emotionally with curiosity and interest to develop a sense of who they are⁴ (see theory post). Did Tupac somehow overcome this handicap, or did something else happen?

Tupac high school photo

A world of judgment

Theory of narcissism describes how the child grows up facing repeated judgment that provokes overwhelming shame. At the same time, it might be that within the family, outsiders are targets of such harsh judgment that the child lives in fear of attracting judgment in themselves. I wonder if Tupac experienced both of these, within a world which judged his family and his kind. His step-father was after all on the FBIs ‘most wanted’ list³.

Afeni once collected her four-year old boy from nursery and found him dancing on a table like James Brown – entertaining the teachers – she condemned the behaviour harshly and physically. Whilst as a future soldier Tupac was idealised by her, a desire to perform was condemned. Taking up the arts had for Afeni, only led to a sense of rejection. And there was more important work to be done. Tupac had to be an “independent black man^”3. But he was much too young to understand her intense reaction – with its complex roots in trauma, history, hope and ideology. In Tupac, it is as if she could not see a child. Or perhaps intellectual and judgmental strategies were her only resources in that moment. One biographer who knew the Shakurs, observed that,

“even though Afeni spanked him, it was her scorching, reproachful stare that burned his soul…for days…the guilt was horrendous.” Harsh judgments came from both outside and from the most intimate relationship he would ever have.³

And so, as in the childhood of actor Charles Chaplin 100 years earlier, Tupac was surrounded by idealised heroes and harsh judgments, and with his own unique emotional vulnerabilities only dimly seen. As one biographer puts it,

Afeni “fostered in her son a warrior-like mentality so he could defend himself against police, or anyone out to cause him harm”³.

When Tupac had to read on the street, under a streetlight the autobiography of Malcolm X, he remembered, “it made it so real to me”. The house electricity of a poor black family had been cut off again. Chaplin, a century earlier, was found by police sleeping by a watchman’s fire at 3am, aged eight.

There is disagreement about the confidence and grandiosity of narcissism. Some liken it to very high self-esteem. Others maintain it is a strategy for dealing with low self-esteem and unbearable experiences of shame.  One biographer is clear that,

“The more [Tupac] poured his soul into his lyrics, the more he voiced the stinging lack of self-worth that made him believe he didn’t deserve the admiration he received.”¹

The archetypal gangsta rap video will show a man confident in his supreme worth to be with the most desired of women. But studying this rapper closely, Dyson concludes that,

“Tupac never seemed to believe that he was someone special and therefore deserved someone special.”

For this boy who enjoyed dancing in nursery, the time for learning about his emotional self, desires and feelings was perhaps lost to a raging social war and inter-generational trauma. The conditions were specific to the family, the time and the place. But on the map of narcissism, we can place Tupac on the receiving end of condemnation and judgment at home, then in the streets and at school. We can see him on the map as emotionally dismissed. But we can also place him as idealised – named as a future social justice leader from heroic heritage. In turn, Tupac himself idealised a number of distant parent figures in addition to the figure of Afeni herself – writing her own bars from a prison cell with the boy in her womb.

Disclaimer: All views expressed are my own unless otherwise stated, and do not necessarily reflect the views of any institution I have been employed by. The content here is for information and should not be interpreted as advice.

*Ryle did not apply this approach only to narcissism. If this mapping approach has been used in your own therapy, this does not mean that you have narcissistic difficulties.

References

1. Dyson, M.E. (2001). Holler If You Hear Me. Searching for Tupac Shakur. Plexus.    

2. Ryle, A. & Kerr, I.B. (2002). Introducing Cognitive Analytic Therapy. Wiley.

3. Robinson, S. (2023). Tupac Shakur: The Authorised Biography. Century.

4. Allen, J.G., Fonagy, P. & Bateman, A.W. (2008) Mentalizing in Clinical Practice. American Psychiatric Publishing.