Narcissistic obsessions killed the Man in the Mirror

Surrounded by his entourage of "enablers" in his hospital bed in the UCLA Medical Centre, Michael Jackson died last Friday with his music playing and "bouncing off the walls". Jackson was to the end a performer, transfixed with seeing himself and hearing himself, with being seen and being heard, searching for the public limelight and for the reassurance of being loved by all. 

One nine-year-old boy, in tears when he heard of Jackson's death, explained that he was crying because no one stopped Michael Jackson from continuing to have plastic surgery and this is what killed him. In some important respect this is true.

Although it is alleged that Jackson died of his addiction to Demerol and the cocktail of painkillers he took regularly, his obsession with his image drove him to extremes of medical intervention. If anyone had tried to stop Jackson from further plastic surgery or another round of prescriptions for pain relievers, they had clearly failed to be heard.

Like Narcissus looking longingly into the pool at his reflection, Jackson could only see his own image in the eyes of others. The reflected image, however, can never reach out and make the viewer feel wanted, it can never have a life of its own, it can never give the love of another.

Jackson’s attempt to obtain love from the reflected pool of an audience failed

According to Ovid's story of Narcissus, the river god, Cephisus, seduced the nymph, Leirope, who gave birth to the beautiful Narcissus. Concerned about his future, Leirope was told by Teiresias that he would come to no harm as long as he did not know himself.

By the age of 16 Narcissus arrogantly spurns the advances of numerous suitors, including the nymph Echo who cannot address him directly but can only repeat what he says. Pining for his love, Echo is heartbroken and wastes away until only her voice remains.

Aware of her suffering, the god Nemesis condemns Narcissus to a similar fate of unrequited love. Coming upon a pool of water, the thirsty Narcissus drinks, falls in love with his reflection and, unable to bear the pain of not being responded to, kills himself. 

Tragically, Jackson's life imitated myth. His striving to obtain love from the reflected pool of an anonymous audience was doomed to fail. Just as there was no real person who could reflect reality back to Narcissus and rescue him from his unrequited love there was no concerned father who could provide a mirror for Jackson's self-destructive behaviour and stop him from killing himself.

Unlike Narcissus, Jackson's father, a failed rhythm 'n' blues singer, was very much in evidence. His mother, who suffered from polio-related disabilities throughout her life, was also musical. However, it was Joe, the father, who was determined - out of his own narcissistic failure - to transform their five boys into star performers and Michael, the youngest and most talented, stole the show from the age of six.

Like many parents of star performers, Joe Jackson brutalised his children by imposing exhausting work schedules and sadistically bullying them into perfecting their musical routines. Michael Jackson admitted to Oprah Winfrey that he would sometimes feel sick from fear at the sight of his father.

What seems to have been especially traumatic to Jackson as a child was his father's nickname for him: 'Big Nose'. He subsequently had so many nose jobs that after a point his surgeons dared not risk another one and began to fake them, persuading Jackson that they had done further surgery when they had not.

For Jackson, the persistent pressure to perform at the top of his ability and to perfect his image to conform to some idealised icon he had in his mind, were powerful indicators of his desperate longing to be loved by a father who had made him feel he could never get it right. 

Michael Jackson's face changed from being that of a black African-American boy to looking like a Hollywood female starlet, with a markedly slim nose, white skin, and a dimple on his chin. Some photographs make Jackson look remarkably similar to such female stars as Elizabeth Taylor and Liza Minelli, both of whom he was close to and admired.

There was an uncanny sense that Jackson was trying to slip into the body of a woman. It has also been rumoured that Jackson was on hormone treatment to preserve his high falsetto voice. His increasingly feminine appearance suggests that he may have felt, at least at an unconscious level, that he could only have really been loved by his father if he had been a girl.

At a deeper level, Jackson may also have come close to resembling a woman as a way of trying to be inside his mother's body - a mother who had not perhaps been able to make him feel she was able to keep him inside her mind. 

Jackson's attempts to transform his physical appearance were also bound up with his terror of aging. While Jackson took other extreme measures not to age, such as sleeping in an oxygen tent, his emotional development seems to have remain fixed at the point of his sudden stardom.

Walter Yetnikoff, head of CBS Records, who bought the Jackson Five from Motown, recalled: "He had no social skills. Sometimes I felt that he was still six." Although Jackson was not 16, like Narcissus, he discovered his nemesis when he was discovered by an adoring public. 

Perhaps the saddest and most telling relationship Jackson managed to have in the course of his life was with his pet chimpanzee, Bubbles, whom he adopted in 1986 and treated much as a baby or a baby extension of himself.

The well-known pioneer of French psychoanalysis, Jacques Lacan, once referred to his dog, Justine, as the only one who never took him for another. By this he meant that his dog did not expect him to be anything than what he was and was therefore the only one who made him feel truly loved.

We can imagine that Bubbles, like Justine, may have been the only one whom Jackson did not feel he had to wear a mask for or perform to in order to be loved. Humans, in his experience, loved him for the star they wanted him to be and his desire to fulfil this role played a major part in his premature death at the age of 50.

Jackson's incessant quest to transform himself into a public idol in order to find the love that he was yearning for may yet ultimately - and ironically - succeed.

The German doctor Gunther von Hagens was said to have been in talks with Jackson months before his death to preserve his body as a 'plastinated' mummy, to be placed next to his beloved Bubbles, who was plastinated a number of years ago, to live on forever together. ·