James Douglas Morrison: A Case Study by Amber Merkel

On March 1, 1969, Jim Morrison exposed himself to 13,000 people during a concert in Miami. The band left the country the next day on a planned vacation, but Morrison turned himself in to the FBI in Los Angeles upon his return. The press had a field day prior to his arrest while he was out of the country. Rolling Stone magazine put Jim’s face on its cover as part of a wanted poster, while the stories more or less portrayed him as a drunken fool. I believed that while he may have been that, he also possessed an intelligence that had been overlooked (Hopkins, p.217).

 In 1970, a jury found Jim guilty of indecent exposure and profanity, but innocent on a felony count of lewd and lascivious behavior, and a misdemeanor charge of drunkenness. Jim Morrison was freed on appeal.

        Consider how Jim’s life might have turned out if a judge, given his record, had ordered him to undertake individual psychotherapy for alcohol and drug abuse while he was on probation (Faris and Faris, p.168). Though there is little reason to believe that he would have sought such help, Riordan and Prochnicky report that Jim, on the urging of Pamela Courson’s father, once had a few sessions with a psychiatrist (Riordan and Prochnicky, p172). However, he played games with the psychiatrist, plying him with a stream of intellectual and philosophical gibberish, and then ending the sessions abruptly when he became bored (Faris and Faris, p.168).

        Imagine then, a reluctant Jim Morrison walks in my office, ordered by a judge to undertake psychotherapy, a common experience these days. Jim reacts to psychotherapy with distain and scorn, but he aches deep in his porous self-core and harbors a vague, unconscious hope that something or someone might pull him up from the void (Faris and Faris, p.169).

The time is November, 1970. Following Jimi Hendricks by two weeks, Janis Joplin had died of complications following an injection of heroin (Faris and Faris, p.169). Janis’s death bothered him. He has his own lingering thoughts about death (Faris and Faris, p.169). Jim is aware that he is slipping into despair, voicing his concern that he does not know who he is. The excitement of performing and inciting people is not enough to quiet the demons anymore. At best the emptiness has become more dreadful. His first line of defense-alcohol-has ceased to numb the pain of emptiness (Faris and Faris, p.169). He is thinking of getting away, thinking again of doing more work on his poetry. In his mind, Paris offers him hope as he plans to leave the Doors (Faris and Faris, p.169).  What follows is the information conducted during several sessions I had with Jim.

        James Douglas Morrison was born in 1943 in Melbourne, Florida, near what is now Cape Kennedy (Hopkins, p.33). For the next two years, until the war ended, he and his mother lived with his father’s parents in Clearwater, in a house that was a safe, warm growing-up environment. When Jim’s father, Admiral George S. Morrison, returned following the end of the war, he and his family began a typical military lifestyle (Hopkins, p.33). Mr. Morrison’s duty assignments forced his family to move from station to station: Jim lived in Pensacola, Melbourne, and Clearwater, Florida, twice in both Washington, D.C. and Albuquerque, New Mexico, and once each in Los Altos, Claremont, and Alameda, California before he finally attended high school in Alexandria, Virginia (Faris and Faris, p.142).

Neither parents spanked the children (Jim had a younger brother and sister). Jim said it was the quasi-military way of disciplining. His parents always ‘dressed them down’ (a military phrase), to tell them what they had done wrong over and over again, until reducing them to tears. Jim learned to hold back his tears. Away much of the time, Jim’s father fluctuating between treating his children as recruits and exercising little parental authority, choosing instead to let his wife apply whatever discipline might be necessary (Faris and Faris, p.142). Jim’s parents never talked about his father’s work when the children were around, it was all a big secret. Jim came to resent the alienation that resulted from the long absences and the secrecy.

At age fourteen, the Morrison family moved to Alameda, California, where Jim’s high school years started. His best friend was named Fud Ford. They did everything together, including sneaking their first drink from a bottle of gin at Jim’s parents house and replaced what they drank with water (Hopkins, p.36). Jim admits to being a difficult child, but says it was because he was looking for attention. Halfway through his sophomore year, the Morrison’s moved again, this time to Virginia, where Jim enrolled in George Washington High School (Hopkins, p.37).  Jim’s intelligence made it easy to be difficult and rebellious in school. He rejected conventional academic topics and authority of any kind. Instead he used his intelligence to produce extraordinary reports on strange, uncommon subjects (Faris and Faris, p.143). Jim had a recorded I.Q of 149 (Faris and Faris, p.20). He took pleasure in challenging teachers with complex ideas and often used his wits to try to humiliate them. Jim’s classmates perceived him to be a “brilliant recluse,” preferring instead to study unusual, abstruse, mystical subjects and historical figures (Faris and Faris, p.143).

Join now!

In September 1961, Jim started classes at Florida State University, majoring in theatre arts. Jim remained at FSU for only a year. However, a week later Jim finally realized his dream and was enrolled in the `motion picture division` of the Department of Theatre Arts at UCLA (Hopkins, p.48).

Jim became known for his pungent graffiti in the men’s room in the student editing building (Hopkins, p.49). He frequented the Lucky U, a bar near the Veteran’s Hospital, where Jim got drunk and teased the wheelchair vets (Hopkins, p.52). He exposed himself and urinated in front of women in ...

This is a preview of the whole essay