ABSTRACT
Presented originally as the Lionel Monteith Memorial Lecture at the Governors’ Hall, in St. Thomas’ Hospital, part of the Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust in London, this chapter considers the unconscious motivations about why so many people crave fame. After examining the history of the concept of celebrity and fame, the author proposes a particular eight-part theory about the deep, infantile need for recognition by drawing upon such classical psychoanalytical concepts as the “family romance”, “object loss”, “object use”, the “primal scene”, “castration anxiety”, “death anxiety”, “envy”, and many others. He also examines the ways in which so-called “fans” will attack celebrities (often in print but, sometimes, in a forensic manner as well), as a means of re-enacting infanticidal wishes. In many respects, this chapter illuminates the ugly underbelly of so-called celebrity worship, considering the many unprocessed ways in which we use celebrities as public objects in order to satisfy our deeper, primitive sexual and aggressive urges.
