Icon no 2: John Lennon

(Singer, songwriter, actor: 9/10/1940 – 8/12/1980)

Part A

Warning: This post contains descriptions of abuse and trauma

A 17-year-old is at a house party with his soon-to-be fiancée. A joke is made by a male student about this teenager having sex with a gay friend. There is an outburst of violence. The student is beaten up, then, before leaving, the teenager approaches a woman sitting down with another man and impulsively fondles her breasts. When she slaps him, he punches her to the ground and is prevented by others from kicking her on the floor¹. The teenager here is John Lennon, founder of The Beatles, singer songwriter and actor.

As a child, before finding the music of my own generation, I was exposed to The Beatles. I admired the song writing and the playful irreverent banter I saw between the ‘Fab Four’. I relished the sheer romance of them on film in A Hard Day’s Night and Help. Seeing the bleached white video for Imagine, with its call for humanity to find peace, I saw, as a child, a man of moral authority. In other songs, I heard lessons of love and intimacy. Now, as an adult and a psychologist, I am reading biographies of the iconically famous, with an interest in narcissism. Is narcissism a kind of person – part of a ‘dark triad’ of personality types along with psychopathy and ‘narcissistic personality disorder’²? Or is it a kind of post-traumatic syndrome? If the latter, then can the same traumatic experiences provoke, in the same person, both creativity and violence?

In the theory post I described  two specific types of emotional trauma that prime children for narcissism later in life. These were, on the one hand, being condemned, judged or shamed, and on the other, having their emotional needs neglected or dismissed repeatedly. In order to set a path for narcissism, though, these two patterns of experience need another condition: the setting up of specific strategies for escape. Escape strategies can include self-idealisation, performance, condemning others and emotional distance (lack of empathy) or intellectual preoccupation. These experiences are what the map of narcissism (below) predicts we will find in the accounts of John Lennon’s life, if his immense fame and earned success were the result of narcissistic strategies.

The map of narcissism³*

Mimi and George

Mimi Stanley was the first of five daughters of her father, ‘Pop’ who was a boat sale maker in their port city of Liverpool, England. Although Pop was described as a “hurtful and spiteful head of household”⁴, Mimi and Pop were very close, Mimi had taken on a mother’s role very early in her life with her four younger siblings. She was a rational, articulate and well-read woman, but she was also described at times as aggressive⁴. She was contrasted with her sister Julia, six years younger than Mimi. Julia was an altogether dreamier, free spirited and eccentric type of girl.

Mimi had been engaged previously to two doctors and a pilot. At the age of 34 she married a milkman, George, perhaps giving up hopes of marrying into higher status. But being married itself was important enough. And George was due to receive a large inheritance. Much to Mimi’s dismay though, George’s father later cut him out of the will before committing suicide.

Climbing the ladder of social status

Mimi was a determined social climber. In time, she and George were able to move into house known as ‘Mendips’; 251 Menlove Avenue - a class of house that in style and location was a move up. Mendips was not acquired in an entirely legal way. It was a house their existing garden backed onto, and when it became vacant, the couple lifted their belongings over the fence, moved in and then negotiated a below market value price as squatters. This says a lot about Mimi - highly focussed on achieving positive judgment based on appearances and achievements, even if she had to break into a vacant house to achieve it. The only thing missing now, was a child... until John.

John as a child

Mimi: Condemning, shaming and judging

Mimi “prided herself as a standard bearer of puritanical discipline”. Descriptions of Mimi as a mother figure range from “scrupulous but not maternal”¹ to “rottweiler” ⁴. She would make slating remarks about John’s new friends, Paul and George – calling them “scruffs” and “common types”. Paul McCartney, in return, thought “she was the kind of woman who would put you down with a glint in her eye”⁴. Cynthia Lennon, John’s first wife, told an interviewer, “Time after time I saw her upset him with negative remarks about him... John would become angry and embarrassed then run”.⁴

Whilst John craved reading comics and music, these became a sphere of control over what John was allowed enjoy (classical music only), and the boy’s own desires and needs were often condemned. When John was a teenager, Mimi would root through the artwork and poetry in his room and throw pieces away - much to John’s dismay.⁴ George was a warmer parental figure and taught John to read. In time though, he became an alcoholic and a compulsive gambler, and he too would be a target for Mimi’s put-downs⁴.

Biographer Kenny links this environment to John’s later emotional distance from himself:

“the emotionless environment in which John found himself forced him to supress his feelings for fear of further rejection”⁴.

Returning to the map of narcissism, it seems that emotional neglect or disregard, condemnation and denigration, and also the focus on external performance and appearances, were all features of Mimi’s parenting. But this woman, Mimi, was not John’s mother. Julia, the dreamy sister six years younger, was John’s mother. Julia had wanted to keep John. How Mimi came to be John’s adoptive mother is a matter of strong and conflicting views.

Julia Stanley: admirer

Dreamy and eccentric, Julia Stanley enjoyed singing and playing ukulele, accordion and banjo, taught by her grandfather. In 1928, when Julia was 14, she had met the man who would be her husband and the father of John, Alf Lennon. If we had been there – at the time of their meeting in a park, we would have seen Alf, 16, wearing a bowler hat and biting a wild woodbine cigarette in a holder. When he tried to chat up the young Julia, she laughed at his appearance, and he responded by spinning the bowler into the lake by which they were sitting. He would later propose marriage in response to Julia betting that he wouldn’t.

Alf Lennon: performer

Alf Lennon is described as having an “exuberant spirit and the ability to perform a song at the drop of a hat” ⁴. At weekends, Alf would perform a ‘Saturday Show’, for friends and family, performing songs and imitations of Charlie Chaplin. He had what his brother called a “show off spirit”¹. This spirit had been passed down from his own father Jack Lennon. Jack had emigrated to the US in the 1880s to join ‘Andrew Roberton’s Coloured Operatic Minstrels’. Playing banjos, their outfits included ‘blacked’ faces, outsized collars and stripey pantaloons.

Alf Lennon was the sixth of eight children born to Jack’s second wife ‘Polly’ (initially Jack’s housekeeper). Malnutrition and poverty were close at hand and Alf developed rickets - wearing iron braces on his legs from an early age. Alf was the most musical of Jack’s children and the two of them would sing together – songs like ‘Ave Maria’. Alf himself at the age of 14, despite his physical disability, ran away with a dance troupe, only to be hunted down by his boarding schoolteacher. Eventually Alf joined a passenger ship crew where he became popular doing songs like Al Johnson’s ‘Sonny Boy’ and impressions for the crew¹. So, it seems that Alf’s ‘show off spirit’ was passed from Jack to Alf, at least partly, through intimate experiences within a special father-son relationship.

John with Julia

The battle for John Lennon

Alf and Julia were married in 1938 with Alf’s brother and Julia’s friend as witnesses. Pop’s disgust was “explosive” about his daughter marrying this man of lower status¹. Mimi and Pop tried to engineer Alf out of the family – Pop arranging for him to be posted on a ship headed for the West Indies. Alf missed the birth of his son John by three weeks whilst at sea, as the second world war got under way.

Alf would send postcards home to his wife and John, describing what must have seemed to little John like glamourous and exciting adventures. But after an 18-month voyage, Alf returned to find his wife with a new partner Bobby Dykins and the four-year-old John staying at Mimi’s house, temporarily. Mimi and Pop began to use their standing in the community to persuade social services that Mimi should have custody of John. Mimi claimed that four-year-old John had walked from Julia’s to her house alone when left by himself.

Coveted by Mimi

It seems that whilst Mimi was very concerned about the shame her sister would bring onto her family, she was also concerned with what it looked like that she and George had no children of their own. Mimi herself had been born out of wedlock and this may have been a source of shame⁴. External appearances were everything and she tried desperately to ‘tick all the boxes’ of acceptability. This is important if little John, ‘a son’, was one of these ticks – a kind of currency. Perhaps more so if George was gay (as some biographers suggest) and her childlessness raised questions⁴.

Abducted by Alf

When John was five, Alf returned – only to try to abduct John from Mendips, with an idea for them to emigrate together to New Zealand. Julia and boyfriend Bobby set out to find them. They found Alf and little John staying with friends in the seaside town of Blackpool, and Julia asked John to make a choice – between his father and his mother. John initially opted to continue his journey with this rediscovered father. But when Julia agreed to leave, John broke down and could not let her go without him.

Alf was taken to the pub by his friends and could later be heard singing Al Jolson’s ‘Little Pal’ – the words changed to ‘Little John’ with tears running down his face¹. Singing, for the Lennons, was a way to manage all loses.

Stolen from Julia

The turning point arrived one day when Julia was beaten up by Bobby and went to Mimi with John for support. Mimi flung John behind her and screamed at her sister, “you’re not fit to be this boy’s mother!”⁴ After a determined campaign by Mimi and her father, social services removed John from his mother’s care by an ‘Order of Public Service’. Biographer Kenny concludes that, “Mimi had acquired John as she had acquired Mendips: by stealth and subterfuge”. ⁴ So losing his distant, exciting father, and being taken from his affectionate, yet neglectful mother, was how John’s experiences at Mendips, void of empathy and marked by judgment and denigration, began.

For most of us, our early experiences of vulnerability are relatively manageable, with the help of the adults around us. In John’s early life there were a number of huge losses, superimposed on normal childhood emotional vulnerabilities. Whilst Mimi paid great attention to external appearances, these internal conditions of the boy were, to the adults around the young boy, invisible, dismissed or at times condemned.

In part B, I will look for illustrations of how, during these same childhood years, John was introduced to and developed strategies for escape from emotional trauma. These strategies included performance, persona and later fame. But they also included judgment, denigration and attack.

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.

References

1.     Norman, P. (2009) John Lennon: The Life. Ecco.

2.     Paulhus, D.L. & Williams, K.M. (2002). The dark triad of personality: Narcissism, machiavellianism and psychopathy.  Journal of Research in Personality, 36, 556-563.

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

4.     Kenny, F. (2020). Understanding John Lennon. Shepheard-Walwyn.

*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.