Lindsay+Lohan

By Diana DiGangi

=BIOGRAPHY = Lindsay Dee Lohan was born on July 2, 1986 to Michael and Dina Lohan in Cold Spring Harbor, a tiny village located on Long Island, New York. Lindsay’s father Michael worked on Wall Street, while her mother Dina was former dancer who claimed to have performed as a Radio City Rockette. It may seem as though Lindsay, being Michael and Dina’s first child, would be bound to have been thrust into some sort of show business. In fact, when Lindsay was only three years old, she was signed by the Ford Modeling Agency and appeared in numerous commercials and advertisements (Wills)

It was only a matter of time before Michael Lohan’s sketchy habits would have a major impact on his family. Not only was he abusive to his wife Dina, but in 1990, when Lindsay was at the young age of four, Michael was sent to jail for fraudulent trading in commodities futures. This event caused the Lohans to move back to Dina’s hometown of Merrick, another village located on Long Island (Wills).

After appearing in popular movies such as The Parent Trap and Mean Girls, Lindsay’s life began to spiral out of hand. She began to question her life, and wondered who her real friends were, if she even had any, and wanted to be with her family very badly. This combination of loneliness, absence of a father, and becoming rich led Lindsay to turn to the club; she would go out frequently with fellow stars and drank often. She began using drugs such as cocaine, became bulimic (Peretz, 2006). In addition, Lindsay was charged several times for D.U.I.s and entered rehab at least three different times for her unhealthy addictions (Sales, 2010). Lindsay, now 24 years old, has dated several people throughout her life, one being a girl named Samantha Ronson. Lindsay stated in an interview that she would not consider herself a lesbian, but maybe bisexual (Heyman, 2008).

=BIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE = Lindsay Lohan is not an easy person to figure out. One could say there is a lot going on her head that many people just do not seem to understand. Perhaps there is a biological reasoning behind her actions that cause her to engage in dangerous, wreckless, and careless behaviors. The Biological Perspective could account for many of these actions and explain them as a factor of her biological make-up.

One aspect of the Biological Perspective is the fact that each person has a temperament, which is a stable individual difference in emotional reactivity. The four basic aspects of temperament include activity, emotionality, sociability, and impulsivity (Friedman, 2009). According to these dimensions, Lindsay would classify as highly active, and engage in vigorous action. She would not classify on the passive dimension of this aspect, considering all the misdemeanors she committed, including chasing a woman down in her car (Sales, 2010). Lindsay would fall under a high emotionality temperament, which means she is easily aroused as opposed to calm and stable. The third temperament, sociability, says that Lindsay is approaches others and enjoys being with people. This is especially reflected through her habits of going to the clubs with fellow celebrities such as Paris Hilton, Nicole Richie, or an Olsen twin (Peretz, 2006). Finally, Lindsay is identified by her low impulsivity seeing as she is conscientious and friendly as opposed to aggressive and cold. While she may be seen as aggressive considering she tends to go after what she wants and has proved to be an ambitious actress, she is a friendly person who has gotten compliments by celebrities such as Meryl Streep for her presence and liveliness (Peretz, 2006).

One important researcher following the Biological Perspective is named Hans Eysenck, who came up with the introversion-extroversion model. Eysenck claimed that extroverts have a low level of brain arousal, while introverts have a higher level of internal arousal (Friedman, 2009). This being said, Lindsay would certainly be classified as an extrovert, which is extremely evident being that she is a very famous actress who has become a household name. Actresses must display themselves in front of millions of people and get some sort of excitement out of it, which is a quality Lindsay certainly possesses. Expanding on this idea, Jeffrey Gray proposed that there are two relevant biological systems that determine what a person’s behavior is directed towards. The behavioral activation system regulates a person’s response to rewards (Friedman, 2009). This sector of Lindsay brain seems to be especially active in that she has been reported on numerous occasions to drink excessively and even have taken cocaine (Sales, 2010). These drugs stimulate the reward center of Lindsay’s brain, thus reinforcing her to take more and more, ultimately leading to her charges of D.U.I.s. This idea also relates to Zuckerman’s theory about sensation seeking. Lindsay is high on sensation seeking, meaning she has a low level of internal arousal, making her drawn to novel and exciting experiences, such as drugs and alcohol (Friedman, 2009).

Lindsay’s identification with being bisexual would be looked at as a result of genetic factors, according to the Biological Perspective. Research in the past has found that individuals can have predispositions to being homosexual that are at least partly determined by genes. However, bisexuality is a less understood phenomenon. Researchers suggest that bisexuals do not have a strong genital arousal to both male and female stimuli, and that it is more of a subjective interpretation of being aroused (Friedman, 2009). Lindsay falls under this category, since she has dated both men and women. Seeing as individuals viewed from this approach behave in ways that are solely determined by their genes, it is clear that this view would support the idea that these individuals have no free will. The Psychoanalytical Persepective views behavior in a similar way.

=PSYCHOANALYTICAL PERSPECTIVE = The Psychoanalytical Perspective is a well known approach that is based on the writings of Sigmund Freud, who emphasized the unconscious processes of the mind. Freud believed that the mind was divided into three sections: the id, ego, and superego. The id contains our primitive drives and emotions and operates on the principle of pleasure. The ego acts as a mediator between the id and the superego and is based on the principle of reality. Finally, the superego is comprised of internalized social norms, focusing on the principle of morality. Freud believed that when the ego and superego do not function the way they are supposed to, elements of the id may slip (Friedman, 2009). This idea can certainly be applied to Lindsay Lohan. While society, especially the world of Hollywood, expects people to act a certain way, Lindsay has proved to go against these norms several time. Becoming negatively viewed by tabloids all over the internet as a party girl does not exactly give Lindsay the best reputation. Many stories have been leaked about Lindsay drinking excessive amounts of alcohol and behaving in ways far from what society would deem as acceptable, especially being a celebrity. All in one night, Lindsay was caught for driving offenses, had an assistant quit on her, chased down the assistant’s mother, ran over a man’s foot, and was caught with cocaine on the scene (Wills). Lindsay’s id, being based around the idea of pleasure, clearly has been doing a lot of work, while her ego and superego have not been functioning properly. If they had, she may have realized these actions were not intelligent in a realistic way, and were certainly against society’s norms.

Freud defined five psychosexual stages a person goes through during the course of his or her life. The development of the psyche, according to Freud, progresses in stages as the libido—a person’s desire or sexual energy—is redirected to different parts of the body. These stages consist of the oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital stage. It was believed that if a person got stuck in a specific stage, they would become fixated on it, and develop problems related to the stage (Friedman, 2009). Lindsay Lohan’s substance abuse can be directly connected to a fixation with the oral stage. In this stage, infants are driven to satisfy the drives of hunger and thirst, and must be weaned from their mother’s breast milk. Lindsay can be seen as having had a problem related to this, which would account for her preoccupation with oral acquisition, namely alcohol. Another stage that Lindsay did not successfully get through is the genital stage. In this stage, the individual is supposed to gain satisfaction from mature relationships (Friedman, 2009). While Lindsay had relationships with men such as Wilmer Valderrama, Jared Leto (Peretz, 2006) and Riley Giles (Wills), she also dated Samantha Ronson (Heyman, 2008). The genital stage is supposed to consist of a person turning their attention away from masturbation and toward heterosexual relations. If a person deviates from this, such as Lindsay, it is considered a flaw (Friedman, 2009).

Defense mechanisms are ego processes that a person uses to distort reality as to protect themselves from anxiety (Friedman, 2009). Lindsay engages in several of these defense mechanisms, one of them being rationalization. Rationalization is a process that occurs when a person creates logical and socially acceptable explanations for the behaviors he or she has engaged in. These actions are actually driven by the person’s unconscious, but the individual is seen to be lying and then claiming their actions were actually intended in a different way (Friedman, 2009). When being questioned about going to many clubs at night, Lindsay claimed, “I want the respect that I had when I was doing great movies. And if that takes not going out to a club at night, then so be it. It's not fun anyway. I don't care. It's the same thing every time” (Sales, 2010). It is clear that Lindsay is trying to rationalize her behaviors in the past by claiming that she does not mind if she does not go to the clubs that she had so often gone to, because they simply are “not fun anyway.” Lindsay is dealing with something that threatens her public image, so she must come up with some sort of excuse to protect this image and not make her look any worse than she already has.

Similar to the Biological Perspective, the Psychoanalytical Perspective also believes that an individual has no free will, and that behavior is determined by inner drives and conflicts (Friedman, 2009). Therefore, Lindsay engages in the behaviors she does because of her unconscious desires and fixations that she must overcome. Lindsay could reveal these hidden desires by going to psychotherapy and participate in free association and dream analysis. These were two widely used practices developed by Freud to get patients to become more consciously in touch with the inner conflicts that caused the mental and physical problems that were easy to notice by others (Friedman, 2009). A psychoanalyst might tell Lindsay that the reason she has behaved so badly was because of the negative relationship she had with her father as a child. Perhaps what she really needed was a figure like him in her life and she would not have done the things she had done.

=DISCUSSION = Lindsay Lohan is far from simplistic. One must search her entire personality to come up with some sort of explanation for the undesirable behaviors she has engaged in that make her unappealing to society at large. By taking a biological perspective to Lindsay’s actions, we are able to see that her actions were already predetermined, and that it is her inner biological structures that drive her. Certain people have certain genes that cause them to behave in certain ways that may be deemed unacceptable, and Lindsay can be seen as one such person. By taking a psychoanalytical perspective of Lindsay, we can see that she is largely driven by her unconscious. Lindsay is not consciously in tune with the reasons for her behavior, and if she were to discover these underlying desires, she may alter her behavior for the better.

These two approaches seem to give Lindsay the benefit of the doubt, both claiming that behavior is not determined by free will. This takes the blame off Lindsay and shows that she needs to learn a little more about herself before she can make a change. She may not know it, but there are deep roots to the actions she performs.

While Lindsay does not exactly present herself as a good role model, it is obvious that she has not exactly had the best life, growing up with an absent father and a constant feeling of emptiness. Lindsay’s actions were a result of the helpless and lonely feeling she had, as if she knew no where else to turn. Clearly, Lindsay is a deeper person than the media makes her out to be.

=REFERENCES = Friedman, H. S., & Schustack, M. W. (2009). //Personality: Classic Theories and Modern Research// (4th ed.). Boston, MA: Pearson.

Heyman, M. (2008, November 10). Retrieved from Harper's Bazaar: []

Peretz, E. (2006, February). Vanity Fair. //Confessions of a Teenage Movie Queen, 546//, p. 120. Retrieved from []

Sales, N. J. (2010, October). Vanity Fair. //Adrift..., 52// (10), p. 222. Retrieved from []

Wills, D. (n.d.). //TalkTalk//. Retrieved from []