Lindsay Lohan is one of the young successful actresses in Hollywood. She was ranked #3 on the Forbes list of Young Hollywood Top-Earners with $6 million. Media portrays her as one who parties heavily at various nightclubs and social events. She had three car accidents in 2005 which were widely reported (Rogers 1). In a highly publicized interview with Vanity Fair magazine, January 2006, 19-year-old Lindsay Lohan admitted she has experimented with drugs and suffered from bulimia. However, declaring that she is over drugs, she credited her boyfriend Saturday Night Live’s Lorne Michaels with saving her from bulimia.
She blamed the stress of newfound fame, her break-up with That 70s Show’s Wilmer Valderrama, and the nightmare divorce of her parents for causing her to go off the deep end. In 2007, Lohan has been in and out of rehab twice since the beginning of the year, managing to wreck a Mercedes-Benz between visits to the Wonderland Center in January and the Promises Malibu Alcohol and Drug Rehab Treatment Facility in June.
The car crash, over Memorial Day weekend, also resulted in a drunk-driving charge and charge over possessing cocaine (TMZ 1). Why would such a young and talented woman who has tasted great success in her career resort to such undignified behavior? Thesis: Lindsay Lohan’s personality can be explained by the Big Five Factor Model as one who is very weak in emotional stability as well as by Freudian and Jung theories of personality according to which, she is a person who has a strong Id, a weak superego, high levels of creativity, a quest for the meaning of life and is extraverted.
trait-based theory of personality. According to this theory there are five core personality traits called the Five Factor Model (FFM). The “Big Five” as they are generally known include conscientiousness, emotional stability, agreeableness, extraversion, openness to experience. Conscientiousness refers to being dependable, hardworking, organized, self-disciplined, persistent and responsible. Lindsay Lohan has achieved great success as an actress within a short period in her lifetime and that too with lack of family support. In the movie “Parent Trap”, she did a quite extraordinary job, not simply mastering a Brit accent but also the faltering accents of Brit and American kids trying to mimic each other. She won a Young Artist award and it was clear that Lohan was something special. This shows her hardworking and responsible nature.
She scores very high on the conscientiousness factor. Emotional stability refers to being calm, secure, happy, unworried. While in her early days, Lohan was seen as a remarkably poised girl, later on, she was noticed more for her unruly behavior in parties and drunken behavior on the roads show that she is emotionally unstable. Agreeableness indicates how cooperative, warm, caring, good-natured, courteous, and trusting. Lindsay Lohan has friends who stick by her in times of trouble. They give press reports that she is doing well in rehabilitation. This shows that she is quite an agreeable girl basically. Extraversion refers to being sociable, outgoing, talkative, assertive and gregarious.
Lindsay Lohan’s projection as a party girl clearly indicates she is an extravert. Openness to experience indicates a curious, intellectual, creative, cultured, sensitive, flexible person. Definitely she scores high in this factor as shown by her portrayal of her varied roles in various films. In Freaky Friday, she acted as a girl with her mother’s self inside her. Moreover, she has an affiliation to Kabbalah showing clearly openness to experiences. Thus, according to the Big Five Factor Model, Lindsay Lohan scores high on conscientiousness, agreeableness, extraversion and openness to experiences. She is low on emotional stability.
The Big Five Factor cannot be said to capture the person’s personality accurately. There is a lot of situational specificity in her behavior and it is not meaningful or useful to describe the person in terms of global traits. For example, Lindsay Lohan is said to be agreeable, because she has many friends and is a favorite at parties. However, her drunken behavior towards the legal authorities does not show her as an agreeable person.
Moreover, her numerous affairs show that she has a weak sense of moral responsibility whereas her hardworking nature in her career shows her to be highly conscientious. Thus, depending on the situation, her grading on various factors of the Big Five Model varies. Common traits such as these five factors are not adequate to describe Lindsay Lohan. She is an ambitious hardworking girl who is trying to have fun at the same time.
While she can be disciplined in her career she is not able to be so in her personal life. Thus, Allport is absolutely right in his argument that individuals’ personalities could not really be captured using common traits. Studies reveal that two of the five personality traits, Conscientiousness and Emotional Stability, are universal predictors of overall job performance across nearly all jobs (Barrick, Mount, & Judge 25). Lindsay Lohan has excellent job performance, though contradictory ratings on these two factors.
There are some advantages and disadvantages of a psychodynamic perspective compared to a trait perspective for understanding Lindsay Lohan. The main advantage of psychodynamic theories is that they consider the environment along with the individual. This allows these theories to analyze personalities in a better manner than the Big Five Model which does not take into account the situation at all. According to Freud, all people are born with the Id, develop the Ego at age three, and the Superego which is the moral part at about age five (Luthans 169). It dictates an individual’s belief of right and wrong.
In a healthy person, according to Freud, the ego is the strongest so that it can satisfy the needs of the id, not upset the superego, and still take into consideration the reality of every situation. In the case of Lindsay Lohan, it seems that the id is too strong and her impulses and self gratification are taking over her life. Her superego is too weak and she is not able to judge her actions. Freud holds that the superego is developed through the values and rules of the society in which the child is raised, as represented usually by parents and initially enforced by rewards and punishments. But Lindsay had parents who valued money the most and also did not have any kind of parental control.
The superego represents morality and is the evaluator of right or wrong in accordance with the moral standards of the society. Lohan’s underdeveloped superego may be attributed to the abuse and neglect she suffered at the hands of her parents (The Superficial 1). Because of this weakened superego, her id is allowed to dominate her personality. This explains her impulsive behavior, typical of id.
The disadvantage of psychodynamic theories over trait theories is that they generally ignore the inherent tendencies of an individual. Freud holds that the superego is developed through the way in which the child is raised. But then, there have been people who have not had a supportive environment and still became strong personalities – like Abraham Lincoln, who lived in poverty and did not have the best of love at home. Yet he became one of the strongest Presidents America has ever known. The Big Five theory would have explained this by declaring him as a person strong on all five factors: conscientiousness, agreeability, extraversion, openness to experiences and emotional stability.
Works Cited
Barrick, M. R., Mount, M. K., & Judge, T. A. (2001). Personality and performance at the beginning of the new millennium: What do we know and where do we go next? International Journal of Selection and Assessment, 9, 9–30.
Lazarus, S. Richard. Adjustment and Personality. McGraw-Hill. New York. 1961. Page 137-45.
Luthans, Fred (2005). Organizational Behavior. McGraw-Hill Publishers. Tenth Edition.
Rogers, John. Lindsay Lohan: From childhood star to troubled adult. The Sunday Times. 2007. Web.
The Superficial. Lindsay Lohan’s Parents are to blame. Page Six. 2007. Web.
TMZ. D.A. to Lindsay – You’re Not a Felon. AOL news. 2007. Web.