“The person that my fans think I am is just as important as the person I think I am.” - John Frusciante
In this quote guitarist John Frusciante, who is most famous for being a guitarist in The Red Hot Chili Peppers, expresses a few different ideas. One is the acknowledgement that a public figure or artist’s public image is not necessarily the same as who they are in real life. Then, regarding this, there is the expression of the opinion that both of these images are equally important in his eyes.
This is an interesting way of thinking and I guess in order to understand it we must first look at each of these images in isolation.
First of all, what does someone mean when they talk about a person as a specific thing? I suppose this would be a combination of two things, a person’s appearance and a person’s personality. These two things are also linked together. Our opinion of a person, for example, could make us notice certain physical characteristics more or less or change the way we think about those physical characteristics. For example, imagine somebody is bullied by a few people who have crooked noses during their young childhood. They may grow up to look upon crooked noses as an ugly feature on a person. Then however, during their teens they make friends with someone who has a crooked nose. As they grow to like, respect and trust that person the crooked nose may get less and less repulsive to them, due to the fact that their subconscious perception of a crooked nose representing the pain they felt at the hands of their crooked nosed bullies is changing and now the crooked nose also represents this individual who they now like and respect. The same could also happen in reverse.
There is also something which some psychologists refer to as attractions of deprivation, where someone may be attracted to someone who could potentially harm them because of a subconscious need to recreate troubling experiences and put a happy ending on them, in the hope of being healed. In this instance the weariness that the aforementioned person may feel towards crooked nosed people may make people with crooked noses more appealing to them sexually or in another way.
Personality
Talking about a person’s so called, True personality is very confusing for me, but not as confusing as talking about my own personality. A person does not have a true personality. A person’s personality is a creation that they has been made as a collaboration between the person concerned and the world around them. A person’s brain works in an instinctual, unpredictable and completely un-understandable way. A brain works in much the same way as all natural things work in the environment. It changes according to the way other forces act upon it and it is unknown what those changes will be until the force acting upon it has taken effect. This means that there is absolutely no way of predicting with certainty how you will react in certain situations. When a situation arises, nature will decide what your reaction will be. You will react the same way a cliff reacts when it is repeatedly hit by waves. You will react the way a plant reacts to sunlight. You will react the way a wild animal reacts to hunger. You will react the way a dog reacts to fear. This is a frightening thought however, and that is why we create a personality for ourselves in an attempt to logically explain these instinctual decisions.
(Totoro, a physical example of nature’s presence)
In this respect Frusciante’s quote is true in a sense because the fact that our opinion of ourselves is self constructed means that it can be easily influenced by others opinions of us. A public figure therefore would probably end up unconsciously using public perception as part of their own identity.
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