This Is Such A Weird Take That John’s Mom Dying Horrifically In A Car Accident Right Underneath His

This is such a weird take that John’s mom dying horrifically in a car accident right underneath his bedroom window counts as hagiography regardless of whether the driver was drunk or not. It was still a traumatic thing for John. Also why is it never acknowledged there is massive hagiography for Paul “everything can be explained away as his actions are always right” McCartney?

It’s also massively problematic for anyone to diagnose anyone else without a formal mental health evaluation and even more wrong for a mental health clinician to do it via taking pieces of biographies out of context. Also Erin Torkelson Weber is biased. Ugh. So many things I hate about this and once again it’s taking a complex person like John and taking out his worst pieces out of context to form a half baked conclusion.

Hi :) my friend just sent me a link to a podcast episode called "The Psychology of John Lennon" by Psychology in Seattle. I'm kind of interested but seeing as the episode so awfully long and I have no experience with that podcast idk if it's worth a listen. So I wanted to ask if you have given that one a go and if so what are your thoughts on it? Is it insightful?

P.S.: I love your blog, I really appreciate all the hard work that goes into your posts and they're always so interesting to read!!

Hiya anon!

Thank you for the lovely “PS” message btw — I really appreciate hearing that!! :)

I have listened to this podcast a few times, and I’ve actually recommended this specific episode (which can be found here (x)) quite a bit – so I’m pretty familiar with it! The short answer here is that I would recommend it. It’s a decent illustration of the key arguments concerning a diagnosis for borderline personality disorder, albeit, not a comprehensive one. But id say the host gets the job done, and it’s a good starting point for wider discussion.

The long answer, is that the episode does have a handful of flaws. There were two main issues I recall having with it, the first being that Dr Honda assumes Mimi’s parenting was not in any way problematic or abusive. He discusses Julia’s parenting, establishing it as chaotic, and also discusses Alfred's parenting —or lack thereof, really— and illustrates how both these early abandonments would have affected John. He even mentions an intergenerational aspect to the family-line which I thought was interesting (I’m actually working on whole post dedicated to that topic!). But then he brushes off Mimi’s parenting as “good-enough”, when it evidently had a more substantial impact on John.

In discussing how a borderline personality might have developed for John throughout his childhood, I just don’t believe you can dismiss Mimi in this way, since she was such a pivotal figure in the formation of his personality. Her treatment of him appears to have been emotionally and verbal abusive — and that isn’t a judgement of her, nor is it to say that she didn’t love him (or that he didn’t love her), but simply that if you read the various accounts of her parenting styles, it seems fairly apparent that it is what would be considered abusive today. I do appreciate that John was probably always going to be difficult, and that she had her own issues largely stemming mainly from her father — but these things don’t ultimately dispel the argument that her parenting could be abusive. So essentially, Mimi's needed to be discussed in more depth for this to be a comprehensive outlook on John’s childhood. As well as this, the episode would have been improved had he dedicated more time into discussing the impact of Uncle George and his death.

The second issue I had with the episode, was that the host largely neglects to discuss John’s relationship with Paul. There are parts of the podcast where he does discuss their closeness, but overall it didn’t feel to me as though he had really recognised the depth of this relationship. Im aware that he recently did an episode on Get Back, which I haven’t gotten round to listening to just yet — but I’m interested to see to see if perhaps his perspective has changed/grown.

There are other things in the podcast which I take issue with (for instance, his understanding of the relationship between John and Yoko could be fairly shallow and one-sided), but it seems to me as though these things tended to be more-or-less related to a problematic historiography. I appreciate that Dr Kirk Honda has done dozens of these kinds of episodes, where he analyses the psychology of various celebrities and characters, and offers potential diagnosis’s for them – and therefore, I’m not expecting him to be an absolute expert on John Lennon. When you’re running a podcast which is fairly miscellaneous in its subjects, there’s an extent to which you can research each topic, and so I cant really expect the host to have studied practically Every Single Area of John Lennon’s life. There are things which I would have been more attentive towards — but I’ve dedicated, frankly, an amount of time into researching him which therapists would find concerning (*kidding*…..but not really). Additionally, I would presume that the shows hosts haven’t read most of the biographies in which they gathered their information from with much critical thought, because they’re not The Almighty Great Erin Torkelson-Webber. So effectively, their understanding of John Lennon is going to blindsided by hagiography — an example of this would be when the host cites that John’s mother was killed by a drunk-driver, which contemporary reports would disagree with. But I wouldn’t say that this flaw is so much so that it spoils their entire overarching argument, its just a notable blindspot and something to keep in mind when listening to their analysis’s.

On a more positive note, there were merits to this podcast. As a professional psychologist, he is able to offer valuable insights into things such as Janov’s Primal Scream Therapy, and illustrate in laymen’s terms, essentially why its a quack. And despite his arguments being, in my opinion, fundamentally flawed since they neglect to account for two massively crucial figures (Mimi and Paul), he’s still able to conclude with a solid, evidenced argument for John having had BPD.

If you happen to be someone fairly ‘iffy’ about diagnosing (or suggesting diagnosis’s) John with a mental illness—especially something as complicated as borderline personality disorder—id definitely recommend giving this as a listen! You might still conclude that diagnosing him is not the right course of action, or that it has little value, or that its just plain wrong etc. but I still think its a good thing for people to at least understand the arguments here, since I know that in the past when I have mentioned that I think John was a strong candidate for BPD, I am often met with a response telling me that I'm just projecting onto him, which does make me wonder if they’ve really understood the objective outlook in this discussion.

Someday I’ll have to sit down and write up an entire post on all this, collecting the strongest arguments for him having had BPD (and someday I will, I swear!) but for now I’ll just leave you a few other relevant links to this topic:

An overview of the John and BPD argument (x) — @thecoleopterawithana

Exposing the voice of truth: a psychological profile of John Lennon — Deborah Fade (x) + additionally you can read the @anotherkindofmindpod critique of it here (x)

A quote from Lesley Ann-Jones and (a more important) addition from @walkuntilthedaylight (x)