“Some Other Kind of Mind:” Book Review, The Beatles with Lacan, by Henry Sullivan, Part II.

Authorial speculation and armchair psychoanalysis theorizing that John Lennon’s undoubtedly unstable parenting situation and the conflict between his Aunt Mimi and mother Julia provoked deep trauma and emotional instability in the artist’s life and psyche is not new. References to the emotional tumult caused by Lennon’s early childhood can be found as early as Michael Braun’s work Love Me Do and now can be found in virtually every major contemporaneous work in Beatles historiography.

Psychological examination of Paul McCartney, however, has received far less attention. Even the undisputed trauma involving the death of McCartney’s mother, Mary, when Paul was 14, and its emotional and psychological aftermath, has disappointingly received notably less attention from Beatles’ biographers than the counterpoint of Julia Lennon’s death. (The only biographer to seemingly not follow this pattern is, interestingly enough, Bob Spitz).
McCartney’s noted refusal to “bare his soul,” either in interviews or his lyrics; his acknowledged lack of interest in self-examination, his still-living status (granting him the ability to dismiss outside biographical speculation and psycho-analysis) and his relatively stable childhood, adulthood and seeming success in parenting his own children all ensure that, in contrast to his partner, McCartney’s relative psychological health is widely accepted.

Even Lennon acknowledged this in 1970’s Lennon Remembers, describing McCartney as more “stable” than either himself or Harrison. (When Wenner, predictably, attempted to turn this assessment into a criticism, asking Lennon if he meant “straight,” Lennon (at least at that point in the interview) refused to take the bait, reiterating McCartney’s stability). Indeed, one of the consistent themes regarding reviews of Philip Norman’s 2016 McCartney biography was a tone of appreciation for McCartney’s mental stability in the face of fifty years of unfathomable fame, pressure and devastating personal losses. Acknowledgements of the musician’s relative stability, particularly in comparison to the other rock icons and legends, both living and dead, that serve as his peers, peppered various reviews, including Adam Gopnik’s New Yorker piece. 

While Sullivan, in The Beatles with Lacan, does anoint McCartney as the more psychologically stable member of the Lennon/McCartney dyad (a ranking few would disagree with) he also rejects the premise that McCartney is or was in a psychologically normative state. “The primary enigma about Paul is his self-advertised ‘normalcy,’ but normal people do not conquer the pop world twice over.” (Sullivan, 87). In Sullivan’s interpretation of Lacan, the sudden death of Mary McCartney when Paul was 14 is not enough of an impetus to explain McCartney’s obsession with/reliance on music. Instead, Sullivan categorizes McCartney as an “Obsessive,” another of Lacan’s four major personality types. An “Obsessive” is consumed with the question “Am I alive, or dead?” (110). For McCartney, composing music is a way to answer this question, as only living things are capable of creation.

The roots of this obsession, according to Sullivan, date back to Jim and Mary McCartney’s relationship. While virtually all biographers tend to portray the McCartney marriage as stable and healthy, in The Beatles with Lacan, Sullivan speculatively argues that Mary McCartney resented how quickly Jim’s financial and social stature fell (through no fault of his own, but due to the war) following their marriage, placing her in the role of primary breadwinner. This was particularly difficult for Mary, who had witnessed her own father’s fortunes rise and then fall precipitously, primarily due to his gambling addiction. This, in turn, led to Mary subconsciously transferring her hopes for her family’s status onto her new-born son, James Paul. “The obsessional male is a subject who is over-identified with his mother and the feminine. The son must make up to his mother for the failures of a denigrated father/husband who let her down.” (88). In this reading, Paul grew up with an understanding of his father’s failures and felt an obligation to both make good on his father’s debts (as perceived by Mary) and surpass him both financially and musically. “The message the mother henceforth gave her children in the family structure posited that the model of their father was not worth very much.” (Ibid).

Sullivan’s acknowledgement of the severe difficulty of Mary McCartney’s early life (a harsh, almost Dickensian(1)upbringing which many authors either skim or ignore), at least, merits discussion. (93). So does his argument that McCartney learned his widely acknowledged inability/refusal to reveal his emotional state of mind (see Denny Laine’s famous quote: “Paul is the best person I have met in all my life at hiding his innermost feelings”) at his mother’s knee. According to Sullivan, “Paul was … the son of a woman who repressed and denied her own pain,” and her example influenced her son’s own approach to emotional turmoil and conflict through avoidance, repression and an exhausting work ethic. (93).

Regardless, a fundamental contrast exists between Sullivan’s analysis of McCartney, as opposed to his analysis of Lennon. While there are sources (Pete Shotton, Julia Baird, and Lennon himself, to name a few) providing testimony that Lennon’s unstable childhood, parental abandonment and Mother/Aunt conflict psychologically damaged the musician, Sullivan presents no sources to reinforce his key tenets regarding McCartney. Rather, Sullivan’s psychological profile of Paul rests on three major assumptions: one of which is pure speculation and another which is contradicted by other evidence. First among these assumptions is that no psychologically normative person could have achieved what McCartney has. Second, that Mary McCartney subconsciously resented Jim and transferred that resentment to Paul, burdening him with a diminished perspective of his father and a compulsion to succeed where his father failed. Third, that Paul was a Momma’s boy, whose obsessional nature stemmed from his desire to secure and maintain his position as her favorite and displayed subconscious resentment of/competition with both his father James and his brother Michael in order to keep it. (91).

While the first assumption could provoke fascinating debate, the latter two suffer from lack of evidence to support them, and/or Sullivan’s refusal to acknowledge known evidence which seems to contradict them. Sullivan’s theory that Mary resented Jim is seemingly based purely on authorial psychological speculation, as he presents no sources to reinforce it. Meanwhile his argument that Paul preferred their mother to their father – that he was, in Sullivan’s phrase, a “Momma’s boy,” (98) is directly contradicted by Michael McCartney in his memoir The Macs. When describing their relations with their parents, Michael argues that, while both boys loved both parents, Paul seemingly took after their father while “Mum was my love.” (2) (Michael also includes Paul’s rejoinder that both boys were close to their mother but that Michael, being younger, spent more time with her and relied on her more). Sullivan uses The Macs as a source in The Beatles with Lacan, but fails to acknowledge the existence of Michael’s claims which contradict his assessment of the interpersonal relations within the McCartney family.

Sullivan presents probably Beatles historiography’s harshest interpretation of the relationship between Paul and Jim McCartney, citing Paul’s “Some fathers grow to hate their sons,” (given when the musician was discussing his relationship with John) from his infamous 1981 phone-conversation with Hunter Davies, as a telling Freudian slip, but arguing that the lion’s share of the animosity was directed by Paul toward Jim. He argues that Paul’s gift of the racehorse Drake’s Drum to Jim was both a demonstration of Paul’s greater financial success and a critical poke at Jim’s fondness for gambling, and sometimes losing, on horses. (89).

One element Sullivan curiously omits from this more negative analysis of Paul and Jim’s relationship is the physical discipline practiced by Jim McCartney on both Paul and Michael until their mid-teenaged years, and what impact that physical discipline may have had. The Beatles: The Authorized Biography, The Macs, Ray Coleman’s Yesterday and Today and one of McCartney’s interviews with Howard Stern all reference Jim McCartney’s occasional use of corporal punishment (spankings, slappings, and the belt) in order to maintain discipline. While such corporal punishment was evidently standard for that place and period, Sullivan’s omission (particularly in light of his seeming preference to portray Paul and Jim’s relationship as more contentious than it is commonly portrayed) seems curious.(3)

For Jim McCartney, foremost among Paul’s rebellious elements was his son’s musical partnership with Lennon. Sullivan portrays the interaction between Jim McCartney and John Lennon as unfailingly negative, again neglecting evidence provided by Cynthia Lennon which indicates that, despite his initial warnings to Paul, Jim eventually warmed up to Lennon, well before The Beatles became famous. According to Sullivan, Paul’s relationship with John was a way for the musician to both “let himself off the hook” for his responsibilities/debts, as John spurred Paul to more rebellious behavior than he would have pursued otherwise, and to prove to his own father that success could be achieved by following Paul’s, rather than Jim’s, chosen methods. (95). While Sullivan describes Lennon’s drive to compose music as originating from an effort to sublimate his emotional pain, he argues that McCartney’s compulsion arises from two psychological drives. First, his efforts to prove his still living status and, second, as an escape: “Paul McCartney disposes of only three mechanisms to escape inner oppression of obsessional guilt: music, dope, and work. Paul does not sing, play and compose because the occasion demands, but because music is a muse embedded in him. If he sits too long in a room where an instrument is standing … he becomes increasingly agitated.” (109).

As in his portrayal of Lennon, the primary methodological error in Sullivan’s analysis of McCartney is his aforementioned selective use of evidence and unquestioning acceptance of the most controversial and negative material available. For example: he bases his conclusions on McCartney’s relationships with/views of women (with the exception of a few brief sentences from McCartney’s Playgirl Interview) almost exclusively on the account of Francie Schwartz. (98). While Schwartz’s version of events should certainly enter into the discussion, using her account as the almost all-encompassing manifesto regarding McCartney’s views on women is methodologically lazy. It fails to acknowledge that her accounts date to a relatively narrow, contentious time period, and that extrapolating her views out to cover the entirety of McCartney’s life/views on women is simply unreasonable.

An equivalent mistake, which some Beatles historians have made, would be arguing that the acrimony, apathy and tensions existing within some of the “Let it Be” sessions – another contentious and narrow time period, recorded for posterity – represent not only the band’s relations and studio interaction during that particular time period, but across the entire arc of their careers as a working band in the studio. To put it more simply, they represent a misleading effort by authors to utilize narrow, selective, and contentious choices, ultimately failing to place moments, sources and events in their appropriate context.

Despite these significant issues, The Beatles with Lacan does provide some intriguing issues in its analysis of McCartney’s psychology. First among these is that, just because McCartney fulfilled the role of the more stable member of the Lennon/McCartney dyad, it does not necessarily ensure that he did not/does not struggle with his own traumas and emotional and psychological issues. Second, Sullivan criticizes previous Beatles authors for, in contrast to their depiction of Lennon, refusing to apply any sort of psycho-analytical understanding to McCartney, and instead simply condemning or criticizing his faults. (110). Third, Sullivan also highlights the psychological significance of McCartney’s obsessive work ethic, compulsive need to compose/make music, and decades-long self-medicating use of marijuana (109) as evidence of the musician’s non-normative psychological state.

Ultimately, Sullivan’s work and application of Lacanian theory to Lennon and McCartney underscores how badly Beatles historiography still needs a trained psychologist or psychiatrist to explore the individuals, partnerships, and relationships within the band. The book does a better job of provoking questions than answering them, and, because of its reliance on heavily one-sided views and selective evidence in his portrayals of both Lennon and McCartney, fails to provide a more comprehensive and accurate psychological picture.

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Footnotes:
(1) Mary McCartney lost her mother to childbirth at the age of 10 and lived in poverty with her father and siblings after moving back to Ireland, came back to Liverpool and, at 13, left her home and father due to what her son Michael described in The Macs as an abusive stepmother. She then became a widely-respected nurse both prior to and after her marriage to Jim McCartney.
(2) My apologies for not providing a page number for the quote: my copy of The Macs is in my office at work, I’m off for the summer, and I simply didn’t feel like going in just to provide a citation for one sentence. I’m nine months pregnant and its 100 degrees outside. Typing is most strenuous physical activity I feel up to at the moment, let along trudging across campus to get to my office.
(3) To provide historiographical context, Coleman’s Yesterday and Today was published in 1996, and McCartney’s Howard Stern interview did not occur until the 2000’s. Therefore, the major sources available to Sullivan on the subject in 1995 would have been The Macs and The Authorized Biography.

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Thoughts and Comments are Welcome!