The Warrior Queen: Marry The Night, Trauma, Regression, and Recovery
Update 6:31pm 12/23/11: This is now PUBLISHED on Gaga Stigmata. Thanks so very much to Meghan Vicks for her amazing editorial skills and dedication to this piece and the site in general.
Here's an excerpt from my piece:
"To say she glorifies sexuality and mortality, or trauma and sex, would be a mistake. The desire to combine those two aspects of life is so normal as to be quaint, in terms of an analytic reading of basic human psychodynamics. To label what Lady Gaga is doing with trauma, sex, death, and invention “bizarre” misses, I believe, how essentially basic and deeply human her themes are.
What I find perhaps most pleasing about Gaga’s self-transformation in the “Marry The Night” video, which I will explore in more detail below, is that she is bringing to the fore an innocent reveling, often childlike, in fundamental and common intra-psychic processes. Not only is she a gorgeously unhinged libido and aggression, but she is also imaginative, she makes of herself and her world the imaginary, arguably engaging in something akin to pop music play therapy. She aligns herself with her internal complexes and makes art with them. She is pleasure-seeking, even through pain, perhaps particularly through pain. She is polymorphously perverse, but rather than being ashamed of it, she is proud of it."
Please read, comment, and share. :) Thanks, Gaga fans, the world over!
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-K.M. Zwick
This was an incredible read. I'm an aspiring psychologist and a huge gaga fan.
ReplyDeleteWords cannot express how much I enjoyed reading this.
Thank you so very much! Please share!
ReplyDeleteI read your article in Gagastigmata, and I didn't if post my comment there or here, since I want to tell it so you can read it. I LOVE your article. Have you seen the traces of the psychoanalysis based on Carl Jung work though? I have based this whole era (I'm 17 years old, Panamanian boy and proudly a fan of Lady Gaga)on Carl Jung. For example, the way she exemplifies the archetypes in all of these videos: Mother Monster being the Great Mother archetype, Mary Magdalene-Gaga being the Maiden archetype, Lady Gaga being also an archetype, the Trickster, Nymph being Anima and Jo Animus, and let's not forget Yüyi. She even uses numerology when choosing her singles (in my believe) Born This Way is about Birth, Beginnings, and it was the first single. Judas was about the duality, choosing between good and bad, fantasy and reality, and realizing it then in The Edge of Glory as destiny being a siamese force. Yoü and I is about mental stabitlity, it is basically a lovesong recited from Jo to Nymph and viceversa. Marry The Night is about change and embracing the dark side aka ''imperfections'' with joy. The nurse seen in the Marry The Night video telling Gaga she remembered when she delivered her is to me the same who was in the Born This Way video aiding Mother Monster. Thus why she looks ''so much like her mother''. The Gaga we see in this video was in fact one of those little heads going out of Gaga's vagina. In fact, Jo, Nymph, Magdalene-Gaga and all of these alter egos of her are one of those little heads. Gaga is constantly giving birth to herself. That's the meaning of the album though, by her own words: she lives through fantasy and reality in constant renewal. To remind you something, Gaga said there were going to be 9 singles and therefore 9 videos. 9 is a peculiar number in numerology as science: it depicts the last truly number in numerology, and it depict the final month of pregnancy, curiously it was the same number of months she waited until the release of Born This Way, since its annoucement (September 2010)I'm very amazed by her work, thanks for sharing your thoughts!
ReplyDeleteVery cool. I'm not of Jungian branch of psychoanalysis/dynamics, so cannot comment much on that, but you should write a piece for Gaga Stigmata about this! My favorite analysts are Freud(s) (Sigmund and Anna), Melanie Klein, and Wilfred Bion. I also like me some Winnicott, Erik Erickon, and Lacan, to name a few. I enjoyed reading your comment. Thanks for reading my article, and I'm glad you enjoyed it!
ReplyDeleteOh my gosh. And Nancy Chodorow. Huge Chodorow fan. And Irene Fast's articles about the pre-Oedipal phase are very important to me as well.
ReplyDeleteHahahaha!!! I was very fascinated with this era and the album, cause she was always saying these clever phrases that somehow were related to Carl Jung. I'm in a all-male catholic school, so I reached to the priest to talk about his views about it, and I asked him another point of view. For example, he said to me the importance Gaga has put in relating religion to psychology and art, like in the video of Judas; he explained me the whole video to me from his point of view, and to him it was far from being a heresy. What I'm trying to say I'll explain it with the scene she has this big hat and is trying to get in the car. She tried the same thing with the album: she tried to put so much concepts, so much ideas into one CD it amazed me how it resulted. It's magnificent. She's meshing religion, psychology, politics, all in one. I'll try to do something for Gaga Stigmata, thanks for encouraging!
ReplyDeleteAlso Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud were friends, so they may be a bit of both on their works xD
ReplyDelete:-) That is great that you talked to your priest about Gaga. Very cool.
ReplyDeleteAlas, Freud and Jung were only friends for so long. Had a huge falling out. Theoretically and personally. There's a new movie out about it in the States, actually. It's not very good, but a lot of delectable psychoanalytic lingo throughout. A Dangerous Method. Definitely write down some of your theories for GS. They're doing a series on the Marry the Night video specifically, so maybe focus on that. Good luck!
I want to say it here, too: Thank you for your piece over at Gaga Stigmata. Really wonderful; I learned lots.
ReplyDeleteThank you, Peter. Enjoyed reading your piece as well.
ReplyDeleteI want to thank you so much because you have provide a whole new perspective on her artistry. I am a loyal fan of her and your piece just enables me to have a higher level of appreciation towards her. I am in the point of my life where I have to decide what I should be majoring in and your piece really solidifies my love for psychology. So thank you again :)
ReplyDeleteThanks, Bunny. Psychology is a great, broad field.
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