Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen: A Case of Mistaken Self-Identity, Corrected by Self-Reformulation

Abstract

Throughout Donald Fagen’s life, he used the concept of bohemianism to position himself vis-à-vis his family, peers, and the mainstream culture as a whole. A psychobiographical examination of the subject with an object relations emphasis found that Fagen used his role as a successful musician to confer on himself a sense of legitimacy and to distance himself from the strictures of conventional, “bourgeois” existence. However, by the end of the first phase of his band Steely Dan’s recording career, Fagen found himself in a musical, romantic, and social dead end, his bohemianism’s promise of self-contained aesthetic completion being revealed as a mistaking of the ideal for the real. This chapter shows that Fagen recovered meaning in life, and thus a multilayered positivity, through psychotherapy, which led to the singer’s reentry into the worlds of music, family, and friendship by tempering the perfectionism and isolationism concealed within his bohemian self-image. Ironically, Fagen’s reality principle gained in strength as he loosened his grip on his mistaken self-identification as a bohemian; Fagen’s self-reformulation late in life allowed him to turn a category error about the artist’s role in modernity into a positive adaptation to a society that requires an adult to play multiple, often contradictory, roles.