Verified by 
Psychoanalysis
Want to Be Famous? There's More to That Wish Than You Think
What's really behind the wish to be famous?
Posted January 15, 2011 Reviewed by Ekua Hagan
Betty* had one overarching daydream: to be famous. I asked if she had any particular area in which she wanted to stand out, and she said, "It just has to be something good. I don't want to be known for being shoved under a subway or having my apartment hit by lightning." She admitted there were other things she wanted — a boyfriend, eventually a husband and children, a more satisfying job — but she was pretty sure that being famous was the key to getting all of the above.
Two common daydreams today are of being rich and/or famous. (I talk about this in my book Daydreaming: Unlock the Creative Power of Your Mind and in my post on money.)
The British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips once explained, "Because money is the solution to poverty, it becomes a kind of greedy symbol for anything and everything we might want."
Same thing for fame: it represents something that we want and think we could attain by becoming famous. But what exactly does fame represent? And how realistic is it to think that being famous actually meets that need?
We have lots of evidence that being in the public eye is a mixed blessing, at best. One of the best marketing tools for any publication, online or off, seems to be revelations about the misery of famous people. Why do we eat this stuff up? Because it confirms what we already know — that public recognition brings its own problems and that those who have it aren't any happier or better off than we are. (My colleague on the Psychology Today website, Susan L. Smalley, has a very smart post on this topic.)
But still, we dream of the "15 minutes of fame" — or much more — that the artist Andy Warhol once predicted we would all have. So what's going on?
Neuroscience and attachment theory offer an explanation of what we are looking for: according to recent research, normal human development requires that we feel recognized and seen by others.
In early infancy that feeling is relatively easy to attain, since adults are programmed to respond to the unblinking gaze of babies, and parents, in general, do attempt to meet their little one's needs for food and comfort. But as a child develops, and their needs become harder to meet, a parent's life also often becomes more complicated. Other children, other adults, the marital relationship, financial needs, and household needs start to interfere with a parent's ability to empathically understand and respond to a child. Even in the best of homes, a child may sometimes feel unseen, at least some of the time.
Despite all the hoopla of contemporary psychodynamic theory, this lack of recognition at home is not, all bad. It is part of what makes us start to look for recognition outside of the family — at school or in after school or weekend activities, for example. It is part of the push for siblings to connect to one another, and part of what makes us look for and develop friendships. As the psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott once said, "good enough" parenting is much better than perfect because if we got all of our needs met, we would never move out of the parent/child relationship.
So what does a daydream about becoming famous mean? Well, it can have lots of personal components. For example, I encouraged Betty to keep talking and thinking about her fantasies, and gradually she began to draw a more detailed picture of what she was looking for. Details, even insignificant ones, are far more important than we tend to think. (I've talked about this in some of my earlier posts, and I've also written about it. If you want to see more, check out my articles "Using Daydreams in Psychodynamic Psychotherapy" in The Clinical Social Work Journal and "Speaking of Feelings: Affects, Language and Psychoanalysis" in Psychoanalytic Dialogues.)
It turned out that Betty really wanted to be like Sandra Bullock. "She's beautiful, and talented, and everybody loves her," Betty said. Wanting to be loved is almost always linked to a desire to be seen or recognized. So is the wish to be popular. Betty's daydreams included moments of receiving a standing ovation from an audience that included her parents and her siblings. As we explored the fantasy in ever more detail, it became clear that she felt that she had not accomplished something that her family admired; but as we talked even more, two other important pieces of information began to emerge.
First, Betty shared that her family had difficulty expressing strong emotion. Her parents were quiet, soft-spoken people who seldom spoke of either positive or negative feelings. "They grew up keeping their feelings to themselves. I know they love me, and even that they're proud of me, at least sometimes; but they're never going to shout it from a rooftop," she said. A minute later she added, "I guess it really doesn't make sense to try to get a standing ovation from them."
Close on the heels of that realization came another. Betty was not feeling proud of what she was doing with her life herself. "It's kind of silly to dream of getting a standing ovation for something when I'm not even trying to do anything that I would applaud," she said.
Betty's wish to feel that someone else recognized her abilities was not a sign of inadequacy on her part. The psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut said that we all need what he called "the gleam in the eye" of someone who admires us. Attachment theorists, combining their observations of child development with findings from neuroscience, say that everyone needs what they call "reflection" from someone who knows and understands us. Some of that came for Betty in the course of therapy; but as we worked together, she also began to find it in the faces of friends and in her supervisor at work. And then she started to look for it — and to find it — in her parents.
"I don't need them to give me an ovation anymore," she said. "Their admiration is much more subtle than that. But it's there. I don't need to be Sandra Bullock. I'm okay being me."
*Names and identifying information have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals and families.
