the fictive self
It's rather a mystery that half a century has passed with no progress evident in psychology. Quite why it continues to attract folks devoid of intellect remains a puzzle. Okay, so they did finally wean themselves off rat-running, but is their endless stream of just-so stories much of an advance? Indeed, if we deleted all university psychology departments so participants could do something useful instead (digging ditches), western civilisation would proceed as usual.
Freud turned out to be a fraud, Jung' preliminary investigation into archetypes promised more than he delivered – even if his profound insights into the unus mundus and synchronicity are undeniable. Yet apart from Julian Jaynes' exploration of the origin of consciousness there's been nothing of consequence since. Memes and paradigms have been valuable relevant concepts illuminating social psychology - invented by non-psychologists. So it is reassuring to discover that significant advances in our understanding of the operation of the psyche can be made by amateur contributors.
Successful author Jay Martin recycled the title of one of Kurt Vonnegut's short stories for a book of his own, in which he expands the theme of that story: Harry was abandoned as a baby, and “without the presence of real parents as a source of identification, Harry was not able to develop a `real' personality of his own. Instead, he had `fictive' parents, and he developed a personality derived from fictions.” [Who am I this time? 1988, p22] Harry became a skillful actor, but could only come alive as a personality when playing a fictional role.
Martin establishes his thesis by noting that culturally-induced identifications are normal (deriving from role models & stereotypes): “We all live as fictive persons some of the time.” Traditionally identities were created by the community someone grew up in - defined by family, vocation & social class. In the 20th century western countries a trend toward individualism produced the notion of a self-created person. Not just that, a conception of personal reality as self-created: “It is a central fact of human life that each person invents a reality in which to live. We do not discover reality, we construct it.” Martin quotes Nobel Prize-winning physicist Erwin Schrodinger (Mind and Matter, 1958) : “Every man's world picture is and always remains a construct of his mind and cannot be proved to have any other existence.” [p24-26]
However identity has continued to be profoundly influenced by cultural context. If someone grows without a definite identity as a child, they tend to be more susceptible to that context – often to the extent of acquiring artificial identities. “The fictive personality originates when the self or the world seems inauthentic, fragmentary, or unavailable, so that only ready-made fictions seem whole and complete.” Commenting on the pervasive selection of multiple artificial identities presented continually in entertainment media, Martin writes “for the first time in the history of the world, culture is governed largely by fictions. Contemporary culture is `fictive culture'.”
Only someone ignorant of history could believe this hasn't happened before. Actually religions have always produced mass social pathology via brainwashing adherents with artificial identity constructs: all historical cultures evolved their own unique mass hallucinations as social constructs to represent the real world. However, in respect of the globalising of mass media & the vast profusion of identities it confronts participants with in an ever-changing stream of imagery, he's quite right about the unprecedented consequent impact on consciousness & the psyche.
Martin tells us it was in his professional career as a psychoanalyst that he discovered the profound influence of the imaginal realm on the identity of some people. He discovered from encountering some such people as his patients that “fictions can be the most real parts of a personality.” Grasping this as fact is “essential for an understanding of the operations of personalities and society today. Without a knowledge of the fictive personality, we are likely to become its victims.” [p29]
“In 1983 FBI Director William H. Webster sent a memo to field supervisors warning them to be on the lookout for personality changes in undercover agents. The very same elements of personality that make an agent able to play a part are the ones that make it difficult for him or her to shed the role.” He cites the case of one agent who took close to a million dollars in a cocaine deal. After his conviction as a drug smuggler, according to his wife, he “doesn't know why he acted the way he did. The only thing he said was `It wasn't me.. I had to try so hard to be [the false identity] that it wasn't me.'” [p66/7]
Martin mentions the case of another undercover FBI agent who became so comfortable in his false identity that he slipped into the habit of using it when not assigned to any case for that purpose. After he gave the false name when arrested for shoplifting, he was fired by the FBI.
The famous instance from literature of obsession with a false identity is cited: addiction to tales of chivalry caused a wealthy land-owner to sell off pieces of his estate to buy more books until “Don Quixote's mind becomes so filled with his fictions that these dislodge his previous grip on reality.” [p80] Indeed, the intersection of the imaginal realm and the real is traversed by many people - some of whom are adept at repeating the traverse, while other intrepid voyagers into the imaginal fail to return to reality at all! Then, of course, there's the fact that what's real for some folks is unreal for others, which has become a primary tenet of postmodernism.
What is instructive is the extent to which the identity of some people is constructed, even if only partially, by fictional roles when acted out in real life. “Literary critics, philosophers, psychoanalysts, and all of us, in an ordinary, normal way, recognize that the power of fictions resides in their ability to promote identifications. Fictions are central to growth and creativity. But in the personality I am looking at, the identification has a completely different quality, seeming almost to amount to possession. The identification does not stop at resemblance – it becomes total, incorporating the violent and depressive aspects of the fictional character without self-examination, in a completely unscrutinized, indiscriminate manner. Fictions do not simulate life, they are a source of life.” [p81]
“By profession, actors and actresses must learn to play parts, shift shapes, take on roles. As far back as Plato's dialogue with the actor Ion, we know, the best players were able to fuse their personalities with their roles, so that the identity of person and role, not the gap between them, shone forth. Undoubtedly, a major influence upon the frequency, if not predominance, of fictive personality in the modern acting profession is related to the influence of the great theoretician of acting, Constantin Stanislavski. Again and again in his book An Actor Prepares and elsewhere, Stanislavski returned to the same theme, that an actor should “feel the situation of the person in a part so keenly... [that] he actually puts himself in the place of that person.” His insistence on confusing and fusing actor and role as well as character and person is fundamental to his method. When the actor finds his way into a role, Stanislavski writes, he “ceases to act, he begins to live the life of the play”... “For method acting,” a recent critic has written, “becoming the character was the whole point.” The Stanislavski method has been enormously influential”. “Are persons who become actors or actresses influenced psychologically by the continuous emphasis on becoming the parts they play in their profession? And does this bring them strongly into the sphere of the fictive personality? Or, are people (like Vonnegut's Harry) who have some prior pleasurable contact with fictive processes drawn especially toward certain professions, such as acting? The answer would seem to be yes to all the questions.” [p108/9]
“William Cody lived a life that was normal for a frontier scout until 1869, when the dime novelist and playwright Ned Buntline found him sleeping under a wagon and began to write about him as Buffalo Bill. Having become something of a celebrity through Buntline's works, Cody visited Chicago in 1872. Here, his career had a turning point. He was offered $500 a week “to play the part of Buffalo Bill myself,” “to represent my own character,” he writes in his autobiography. “I feared I would be a total failure,” he wrote. But eventually he did go on stage, and so began the remarkable transformation of Cody into `Buffalo Bill'. This unlettered plainsman, under the impact of the fictions he imitated, developed into a sophisticated, courtly hero. More and more he looked like General Custer. Eventually, in his Wild West Show, he `fought', with fake bullets and blunted arrows, the Indians he had once actually battled. By the end, he no longer seemed to know the difference, and in his old age when he wrote his autobiography, its hero was the fictional character invented long before by Buntline.” [p110/111]
“In 1979, an updated version of the same story made news. After decades of playing the Lone Ranger on radio and television, in films and circuses, Clayton Moore was obliged by the copyright owners to give up the part in favour of a younger replacement. He refused. He would not remove his mask – until at last a court decision forced him to drop his mask and, presumably, resume his `real' identity. But the Lone Ranger, he claimed, had become his true identity, displacing the original self.” Moore kept touring “wearing a mask-like pair of dark sunglasses” telling the crowds that he “fell in love with the character” and “it helped to make a better person of me... I tell the truth [according to] the Lone Ranger creed.” [p111]
“However, the performer who most clearly `acted' in order to exist as a `person' is Peter Sellers... For the most part, he didn't even identify with actual people, only with the parts played by actors. He was a fiction derived from fictions.” This was evidenced in the title of his 1969 biography - Peter Sellers: The Mask Behind The Mask. Sellers “told an interviewer for the Evening Standard that there's no such person as Peter Sellers... I have no personality as such of my own... I only exist as the various characters I create. They are more than me.”” [p118/9]
“Between films he lapsed into a sort of dazed nonexistence, trying to keep alive through expensive toys or social images. He was ready to adopt almost any role offered to him. Once, when a minor Indian actress came up to him and said she thought he “was the new messiah”, Sellers instantly responded to the new, grandiose role: “I even began to feel that I had developed the power to heal people”. Sellers went from one movie to another: 29 between 1958 and 1968. “Even when he suffered a series of heart attacks, he couldn't stop working: either way he faced death. The loss of a self, or the loss of life – what was the difference?” [p119]
“I think that fictive personality is involved in the whole range of behavior from normal to psychotic, from thought to emotions, passivity to aggression, creativity to destructiveness. Evidently, the process is a permanent element of human beings. It points to the capacity of people, chameleon-like, to use or be used by fictions, and to take on the costumes and shapes and colors of the psychic environment in which they operate. Fictions are fundamental in dreams, daydreams, aesthetic appreciation, meditations, adaption, wishes, defense, and many another human impulse. They are a crucial part of the human character, then – the part, especially, that expresses character traits through identification.” [p126]
“The use of fictions in character development or characteristic behavior is not pathological, and classical psychiatric or diagnostic categories, which start with the concept of pathology and character disorders, cannot give a good account of the nature and operations of fictive processes in character.” [p126]
Character types was a “conventional form in classical literature up to the 18th century”, writes Martin. “Joyce McDougall, in a work titled Theatres of the Mind, has proposed what is, in essence, a psychoanalytically informed, updated version of the classical study of character through its typologies or typical manifestations.” “As McDougall sees the situation, each mind is organized through a variety of internalized `theaters' or dramas.” [p127] Martin proceeds to quote McDougall at length:
“Each of us harbors in our inner universe a number of `characters', parts of ourselves that frequently operate in complete contradiction to one another, causing conflict and mental pain to our conscious selves. For we are relatively unacquainted with these hidden players and their roles. Whether we will it or not, our inner characters are constantly seeking a stage on which to play out their tragedies and comedies. Although we rarely assume responsibility for our secret theater productions, the producer is seated in our own minds. Moreover it is this inner world with its repeating repertory that determines most of what happens to us in the external world.” “Language informs us that the scriptwriter is called I. Psychoanalysis has taught us that the scenarios were written years ago by a naïve and childlike I struggling to survive in an adult world whose drama conventions are quite different from the child's. These psychic plays may be performed in the theater of our own minds or that of our bodies or may take place in the external world, sometimes using other peoples' minds and bodies, or even social institutions, as their stage.” [p128]
Martin comments on this: “Each self has a secret theater – rather like a magic theater in Herman Hesse's Steppenwolf – in which archaic assumptions, antique perspectives, clichéd emotions, like used furniture and leftover bric-a-brac, clutter the stage and, still connected to past roles, determine the actions of the present. Such theaters of the mind bring about the daily repetition of tragedies and comedies and romances played out many times before. At this most general level, then, the fictive processes may be seen as an organizer of the scenarios that drive behavior.” [p128/9]
Martin advocates combining this view with “the theory of fictions proposed by the philosopher Hans Vaihinger. Vaihinger's work is The Philosophy of `As If'. `Fictions', as he uses the term, are conceptions that, though they may refer to nonexistent entities and are never verifiable, are necessary to mental functioning. William of Occam called them ficta and acknowledged their practical necessity; Hobbes spoke of “Conscious Fictions” such as `equality' or `original contract'. But, according to Vaihinger, it was Kant, followed by Nietzsche, who most profoundly understood the necessity for fictions in mental operations. Fictions, he argues, are valuable and indispensable, even as they allow for the dangerous likelihood – even the inevitability – that they will become confused with reality.” Indeed, they are nowadays generally considered profound dimensions of our collective reality. In my college education in the early '60s, such concepts were categorized by our English teacher as `abstract nouns'. “In this analysis such concepts as `law', `freedom', `justice' and so on, are all fictions – constructs that are necessary to maintain social relations and achieve individual selfhood – even as they are acknowledged to be constructs or fictions.” [p129]
“Anna Freud is only one of several analysts who have described the defensive functions of fictive personality formations. The great psychoanalyst and critic Ernst Kris is another. Both defensive and also expressive of a life pattern is a syndrome described by Kris in 1956, in what he called the “personal myth”. He suggests that some patients fashion a myth – a secret, hidden life – out of their own autobiographical memories as these are shaped by early, unconscious fantasies. Their memories, that is, are reorganized by self-fictions rather than by experience and actuality and form a “protective screen”. Its apparently “firm outline and richness of detail are meant to cover significant omissions and distortions.” Such a myth is organized early, at a time when fantasy and reality are not sharply divided, then itself becomes an organizer of later experiences. Kris cites the case of a man who saw himself as a superman, “clearly recognizable as the idealized image of the father, whose role he has adopted in elevated stature.” Kris helps to point us to the fact that fictive personalities draw on what they can get: novels, plays, media – and even life, when necessary.” [p137]
Prominent analysts such as Kris and Kohut “defined pathological aspects of fictive personality processes; but each also pointed to the creative aspects of the use of good fictions. We are obliged to conclude that an infant or child who is badly disillusioned can experience herself or himself as fictive, and this can lead to various degrees of pathology. Contrariwise, a child who is disillusioned can `bounce back', be reillusioned and allowed to believe in good fictions again through good relations with loved ones and the appropriate satisfaction of fantasies. This process constitutes an early creative experience in dealing with the double character of fictions, `good' and `bad'... In anyone's life the process of illusioning, disillusioning, and reillusioning is fundamental to a world outlook. How one negotiates this complex process of illusions will influence, and perhaps determine, one's eventual perception of both reality and fictions, as well as the relation between them.” [p149/50]
So “fictions are an essential element in the process of growth and change. They are fundamental to maturation, since they provide a necessary arena for `trying on' identities and `trying out' relations to others. Yet, at every stage of development, experience with fictions is ambiguous. Not all fictions serve development; obviously, some fictions are 'good', while others are `bad'. `Good fictions' are variously named: `play', `experiment', `improvisation', `imagination', `hypothetical thinking', and `creativity'. `Self-deception', `delusional thinking', `impairment of reality testing', and `illusions' are the terms by which we characterize fictions that hinder or stunt growth and development. `Good fictions' are called `healthy' and `adaptive' because they tend to prepare us for action, compensate for loss, or make flexibility and inventiveness possible. `Bad fictions' are termed `neurotic' or even `psychotic' because they tend to lead to isolation, denial, or grandiosity; they make loss inevitable and block spontaneous experimentation.” [p152]
Martin tells the story of a boy, Jean, conceived as his father was dying slowly of a wasting disease. His mother's milk dried up, so she “sent the baby to a wet nurse”. He developed gastroenteritis, so the nurse weaned him early. “Then, when he was about one year old, his father died.” Back with his mother, he recovered “but was troubled by hallucinations and lack of trust”. Growing up with her in the house of his grandfather, who “doted on the boy”, Jean at age 4 “began to experience wanting to be like his grandfather. In external behavior he imitated him perfectly”. “He had a strong feeling of being an impostor, empty and unreal.” “He was, he felt, “a fake child”, lacking a soul... He became fascinated by silent movies; at home, alone, he played out all the roles he had seen on screen”. [p172/3]
“At the age of 7 he decided to lose the power of speech and remained mute for long periods.” Then, when at age 8 his grandfather (away on a trip) sent him a letter in verse, “the boy replied with a poem”. “He drove me into a new imposture that changed my life,” Jean later wrote. “I received by return mail a poem to my glory; I replied with a poem. The habit was formed; the grandfather and his grandson were united by a new bond.” [p174]
“Jean was given La Fontaine's Fables. He rewrote them in alexandrines, a difficult rhythmic scheme. Soon he began to write tales of adventure. He found he could easily enter the lives of others – so long as he himself had created these others – and that he had a knack for composing tales. He was writing stories, it turned out, not to escape from reality, but as a way of understanding it. Instead of simply swallowing others' stories he created his own, and through them he made his way to reality. Eventually, writing gave him a role in life and a relation to others, an audience. It taught him that his own psychic reality was fundamental, but that he had to account, in his creations of characters and in the response of his audience, for the psychic reality of others. At the age of 8, he says, by means of fiction “I was beginning to find myself... I was escaping from playacting... by writing I was existing.” All the information about Jean comes from Jean-Paul Sartre's autobiography, The Words (1964).” [p174/5]
“Sartre was the first writer to define the philosophy of existentialism, with its emphasis on the imaginary as the core of choice, in his 1945 lecture L'Existentialisme est un Humanisme... the existential quest, as Sartre outlined it, begins with the individual's journey into himself.” If he finds a “core of nothingness” within, he can can find a sense of being by acting freely nonetheless, rather than dwelling in despair. “Through his acts he creates his own essence and the character of a provisional reality. Each one of our acts, Sartre argues, creates “the man we would like to be ourselves”, as well as “an image of the man such as we think he ought to be”. This is basically a theory of fictions. When nothing exists, man can achieve meaning by acting `as if' meaning did exist. Revealed in the theory is the very structure of Sartre's own autobiography. When he learned that by creating fictions he could exist, then he became real, in his creativity, to himself. Through his own activity he achieved a reality that no one else could give him.” [p175/6]
George Patton became one of the first tank commanders during WWI, rising to the rank of Major General during WWII when his decisive attacks caused the top German military leaders to view him as the primary Allied threat. The biography cited by Jay Martin does indeed verify that Patton overcame tremendous defects & handicaps to deliberately make himself a successful warrior.
It took Georgie “a long time to learn to read. In fact, he had trouble learning anything. He had to read things over many times to be sure he understood what he was reading. He found it difficult to write, and could not seem to learn how to spell. He was unable to sit still for long, and his concentration was poor. Today we would call Georgie's problems `dyslexia' and `attention deficit disorder'... He was taken out of school and received individual attention at home... His dyslexia was still evident when he was in college. He also suffered from panic attacks and allergies whenever he had to take a test. Apparently Patton's father and mother presented him with appropriate role models for success, primarily members of his own family.” “Most of the male Pattons had been military men. Many had commanded in the Civil War, or, even earlier, in the Revolutionary War... All of these men were virtuous, courteous, brave, vigorous, efficient fighting men – in short, perfect role models for George as a boy. He pledged that he would be just like them, even if that meant extraordinary efforts. He had to learn to read and write... He had to learn to focus his attention (in order to receive and understand battle reports clearly). He had to learn to mask feelings of weakness (so as to inspire confidence in his men). He had to learn to take criticism... he had to overcome his shyness, and had to bend every effort toward making himself speak in public. In short, he had to remake himself.” [p178/9]
“In addition to the identifications that he developed with a large number of dead military heroes in the family, and from the books his father chose for him (often reading these books to him), Patton added his own group of warriors. His favourites appeared in Walter Scott's novels, in The Iliad and The Odyssey, in Shakespeare's tragedies, in the Old Testament, and in the books of Kipling. All provided him with a strong masculine model... Patton's biographer, Martin Blumenson, writes: “The stories had a strong impact. They induced in him a strain of mysticism, a sense of deja vu, and acceptance of telepathy, and a belief in reincarnation, the feeling that he had lived before in other historical periods, always a soldier – a Greek hoplite, a Roman legionnaire, a cavalryman with Belisarius, a highlander with the House of Stuart, a trooper with Napoleon and Murat.” … From all of these, Patton transformed `Georgie' into General George Smith Patton. In the process, he developed a fine sense of the theatrical. His military actions were deliberately organized as scenarios. He wrote that “the leader must be an actor” and is “unconvincing unless he lives his part”. [p180]
“All his life he honed his personal image, developing what he felt were the appropriate mannerisms – profanity in language, aristocratic bearing, a contemptuous scowl, ruthlessness. For long hours he practiced before a mirror to achieve fierce facial expressions. He spoke often about `my destiny', and became well-known for his theatrical displays. With his pearl-handled revolvers and leather jacket, he cut a flamboyant military figure. He flew into well-publicized fits of anger at soldiers who lacked the fighting spirit. He made brilliant use of public relations media. He was grandiloquent and grandiose.” “Patton relied on such identifications to provide him with a stable image of success and he used his concept of destiny to conceal his partly-conscious anguish that, after all, he might be weak, deficient, and purposeless.” [p180/1]
“William Faulkner's life offers a superb example of the downs and ups of creativity and its alliance with fictions of all sorts. For most of his youth and early manhood, Faulkner considered himself a fraud. He felt that he was impotent as a person, and that it was necessary to be an impostor. If he was to preserve a sense of self at all, it would have to be as a fiction. Yet, for all this, Faulkner finally found an authentic self and an original voice, and became, in the opinion of many, America's greatest novelist.” [p187]
A “double view of himself was reflected in the use of two names.” Born Falkner, 'he changed his surname to Faulkner when he reached maturity.” His historical self he called `a simple skeleton', and his alter ego “was born of a Negro and an alligator” - these two identities would seem to be the two sides of his creativity: the impulsive side, and the shaping side, which was formal, courteous, and controlled.” [p188] As a child he was influenced by a black woman, Mammy, who “became an important member of the family” and “was a good storyteller.” His brother Murray remembered how William “began to tell tales of his own. They were good ones, too. Some of them even stopped Mammy, and she was a past master in the field if ever there was one.”” [p191]
However William seems to have become neurotic as a teenager due to internalizing the conflict between his parents. Their “marriage was filled with tension and division. Whenever he moved toward identifying with either parent, he disappointed one and lost part of himself.” His mother was a strict disciplinarian: deciding that William was becoming stoop-shouldered, she obtained a brace for him “Like a corset... two padded armholes” the back “stiffened with whalebone and laced cross-wise with a heavy white cord. Each morning she laced him into his harness; she was the only person allowed to unlace it at day's end.” “Despondency and inactivity took hold... He wouldn't go to school and refused to work.” [p193]
Later he was betrothed to his sweeheart Estelle, but in 1918 she returned his ring and married a naval officer. Faulkner figured he had to become an officer too, but was rejected by the US Air Force. Then he applied to the Canadian Royal Flying Corps, creating “a fictive genealogy for himself” with an English mother. He did several months of training before the Armistice, then “was mustered out of service” before he had a chance to fly. He returned home with a limp, told people “he had crashed” and “began to construct an elaborate story about his war injury”. After a while the “limp disappeared, but when he went to New York in 1921 it `reappeared'. Again, in 1924, it `came back' in New Orleans.” He met several other writers, to whom he added a head wound. “He intimated that with a silver plate in his head, he couldn't be expected to live long... Faulkner's stories of injuries, though `untrue', were his real truths.” He continued to wear his uniform. “Even as late as the 1950s he frequently donned a hand-tailored, double-breasted, brass-buttoned, and red silk-lined CRFC blue dress jacket... He wore his (unearned) pilot's wings even on his scoutmaster's uniform. Faulkner seemed to feel no guilt over these deceptions. Indeed, he was pathologically addicted to them; they got him the attention and admiration that he craved.” [p194-6]
In 1927 he described himself to Who's Who in America as “Falkner, William (surname originally Falkner)” - this was noted by his biographer Blotner as a “curious reversal” (of reality). Reversion to his real name seems to have been an identity switch due to Estelle returning after divorcing her husband, then agreeing to marry him. “He could start to become himself.” [p197]
The transformation “gave him back a part of himself that had seemed lost.” He'd authored 2 novels as Faulkner, but suddenly dropped a third already in manuscript, instead starting another “Sartoris. This was a seminal work... He suddenly realised, too, that to make his work “evocative... it must be personal,” and he created characters reconciling the ideal with the real “composed partly from what they were in actual life and partly from what they should have been and were not.” He thus regained his optimism – as he put it, he “improved on God”.” [p198]
“From this point forward Faulkner experienced a personality in his writing that seemed new to him, though it was connected to his oldest self, and he began to make the claim that he was different from his books, that Faulkner, not Falkner, was real. He defended this fiction by personal concealment, and by hiding his original deceptions. He accomplished this through isolation and myth-making. His chief myth was that his life didn't count in his work.” [p199]
“Television, of course, has been the prime instrument in promoting the rapid increase of fictions. In particular, it puts heavy stress on aggressive relations. Between the ages of 5 and 14, according to media expert Otto Larsen, “the average American child has witnessed the violent destruction of 13,oo0 human beings on television alone.” … An average of 5 acts of violence occur per prime-time hour, but on the weekend 20 violent acts are seen per hour on daytime children's programs.” [p221/2]
Martin refers to more than 3,000 publications resulting from studies commissioned by the US government following the 1972 Report of the Surgeon General's Advisory Committee on Television and Behaviour. “The surprising result of these studies and many others is that the fundamental correlation is not between aggressive behavior and the viewing of violence on TV; increase in aggression correlates with viewing television, not with viewing violent scenes. The process of viewing is the main factor in causing psychic and behavioral change.” “Though books have always inspired identifications, television seems to bypass control of the ego, encouraging unmediated identification with the image. This is exactly what John Hinckley claimed (without any reflection on his own disordered behavior) when he wrote to the editors of Newsweek: “Watching too much television can cause numerous social disorders. The damn TV is on all day and night in most homes... a fantasy world tends to develop the longer a person stays in front of the tube.” Study after study has found that people of all ages, but particularly children, have difficulty distinguishing what is “real on television”, and this has profound consequences for the development of a sense of reality in children.” [p223-6]
“Very soon children learn that what they believed was real is only illusion.” Thus a new cultural norm originates. “Children learn to follow `scripts' rather than test reality, and they are often bitterly disappointed when reality upsets the scripts they have learnt.” “Our society imitates the fiction that everything is a fiction. This can be observed at the core of personality and social relations.” [p228]
“Christopher Lasch characterized contemporary society as the `culture of narcissism'. His analysis is acute and deserves widespread recognition. Narcissism – a developmental deficit resulting from inadequate early mirroring – is causally in the background of our culture, but it is derivative and not the informing drive of the culture itself. Narcissism is merely one way of describing a personality that has become fictional to itself and seeks reflections in every glass... Our society is composed according to the belief that the self is fictive, society is theater, and events have no meaning beyond their performances. Anyone can be or become anything, because all is fraudulent and everyone is an impostor... Indeed, contemporary culture seems pervaded by fictions. What we are seeing – what I have been describing – is the transformation of the individual and society through the fictions infused into both. Fictive personality is the psychology of our time. Fictive social relations dominate our culture.” [p228/9]
The book concludes with a final case study from the author's professional career as therapist. “My patient Mack's treatment appeared to be going nowhere. Every time he seemed about to reveal a clue to his personality and I made a comment, he would respond flatly: “Don't you know I'm a Martian?” … Then, one evening as I sat watching television, I began to see what he meant. As I watched a dramatization of a segment of Ray Bradbury's novel The Martian Chronicles, I saw what Mack felt about himself. In Bradbury's book, the crucial episode occurs” when an old couple, grieving the loss of their son Tom, are stunned by his re-appearance - he had died, and they had seen him buried. When they question him, he can't explain himself but wants them to accept him. The father can't: “Who are you really? You can't be Tom... You're a Martian, aren't you? I've heard tales... about how rare Martians are, and when they come among us they come as Earth Men. There's something about you – you're Tom and yet you're not.” Tom is upset by this but when they accept him and later take him to town he disappears. Later, they hear of a lost female child that has been found by another grieving couple. “The old man seeks out the girl, knowing and fearing what he will find. Yes, the girl explains, she was Tom: now she is Lavinia. She was Tom when the old couple's desire shaped her so; now she has an identity that responds to another's desire.” ...Mack was playing the role of the perfect analysand, but occasionally he had told me in secret language that it was a role, and I was analyzing a fiction. He had read Ray Bradbury – but long before his reading he knew all too well what it was like to be a shape-shifting Martian.” [p230-2] Shape-shifting between identities can be a useful survival strategy when done as the situation requires!
Once Jay Martin had told Mack he'd seen the Martian story and realised its relevance “he started to dredge up childhood memories, old associations, fragments of wishes, dreams, daydreams, former hurts. Once I had encountered and perhaps even accepted the Martian in him, he revealed glimpses of a real self. His case is like those of many another person treated in this book. He saved himself by learning how to play parts assigned to him. Now he is still learning how to be someone other than a Martian – ultimately, to be himself.” [p233] Therapy can succeed by integrating one's identities.
Martin concludes with this observation: “It is neither possible nor desirable to dispense with fictions. But to possess only fictions means to be possessed by them. However many roles we play for others, we must play as few as possible for ourselves.” This then is the therapist's cure: self-realisation is best achieved by making a real self. If someone is occupying a role which threatens to become permanent, it will not bode well for their future if that role is unconnected to their authentic self. However much they identify with it, it will likely work better for them if therapist, friend or family help them to integrate that identity with the person they grew up as, and/or are deep down. Many of us have a portfolio of identities, between which we shape-shift with ease as our circumstances and situations change, but few of us become conscious of the portfolio or the process of shape-shifting. Think about it; do you act differently to different people? Do you present a different identity at work to the one at home? Do you know anyone who has a character so consistent that they act the same no matter who they're with, or what situation they find themselves in?
I suspect Jay Martin has delineated an attribute of the psyche that psychologists have failed to identify; one fundamental to human nature. Our character is dual - part imaginal, part real. Our personality reflects this duality. Sometimes it exhibits a fictive identity, other times we need to get real. Life's too grim for reality to be our sole option: to survive we need choices. So remember this when real life puts you in a bind; you need but to imagine an alternative, and shape-shift out of there!
Freud turned out to be a fraud, Jung' preliminary investigation into archetypes promised more than he delivered – even if his profound insights into the unus mundus and synchronicity are undeniable. Yet apart from Julian Jaynes' exploration of the origin of consciousness there's been nothing of consequence since. Memes and paradigms have been valuable relevant concepts illuminating social psychology - invented by non-psychologists. So it is reassuring to discover that significant advances in our understanding of the operation of the psyche can be made by amateur contributors.
Successful author Jay Martin recycled the title of one of Kurt Vonnegut's short stories for a book of his own, in which he expands the theme of that story: Harry was abandoned as a baby, and “without the presence of real parents as a source of identification, Harry was not able to develop a `real' personality of his own. Instead, he had `fictive' parents, and he developed a personality derived from fictions.” [Who am I this time? 1988, p22] Harry became a skillful actor, but could only come alive as a personality when playing a fictional role.
Martin establishes his thesis by noting that culturally-induced identifications are normal (deriving from role models & stereotypes): “We all live as fictive persons some of the time.” Traditionally identities were created by the community someone grew up in - defined by family, vocation & social class. In the 20th century western countries a trend toward individualism produced the notion of a self-created person. Not just that, a conception of personal reality as self-created: “It is a central fact of human life that each person invents a reality in which to live. We do not discover reality, we construct it.” Martin quotes Nobel Prize-winning physicist Erwin Schrodinger (Mind and Matter, 1958) : “Every man's world picture is and always remains a construct of his mind and cannot be proved to have any other existence.” [p24-26]
However identity has continued to be profoundly influenced by cultural context. If someone grows without a definite identity as a child, they tend to be more susceptible to that context – often to the extent of acquiring artificial identities. “The fictive personality originates when the self or the world seems inauthentic, fragmentary, or unavailable, so that only ready-made fictions seem whole and complete.” Commenting on the pervasive selection of multiple artificial identities presented continually in entertainment media, Martin writes “for the first time in the history of the world, culture is governed largely by fictions. Contemporary culture is `fictive culture'.”
Only someone ignorant of history could believe this hasn't happened before. Actually religions have always produced mass social pathology via brainwashing adherents with artificial identity constructs: all historical cultures evolved their own unique mass hallucinations as social constructs to represent the real world. However, in respect of the globalising of mass media & the vast profusion of identities it confronts participants with in an ever-changing stream of imagery, he's quite right about the unprecedented consequent impact on consciousness & the psyche.
Martin tells us it was in his professional career as a psychoanalyst that he discovered the profound influence of the imaginal realm on the identity of some people. He discovered from encountering some such people as his patients that “fictions can be the most real parts of a personality.” Grasping this as fact is “essential for an understanding of the operations of personalities and society today. Without a knowledge of the fictive personality, we are likely to become its victims.” [p29]
“In 1983 FBI Director William H. Webster sent a memo to field supervisors warning them to be on the lookout for personality changes in undercover agents. The very same elements of personality that make an agent able to play a part are the ones that make it difficult for him or her to shed the role.” He cites the case of one agent who took close to a million dollars in a cocaine deal. After his conviction as a drug smuggler, according to his wife, he “doesn't know why he acted the way he did. The only thing he said was `It wasn't me.. I had to try so hard to be [the false identity] that it wasn't me.'” [p66/7]
Martin mentions the case of another undercover FBI agent who became so comfortable in his false identity that he slipped into the habit of using it when not assigned to any case for that purpose. After he gave the false name when arrested for shoplifting, he was fired by the FBI.
The famous instance from literature of obsession with a false identity is cited: addiction to tales of chivalry caused a wealthy land-owner to sell off pieces of his estate to buy more books until “Don Quixote's mind becomes so filled with his fictions that these dislodge his previous grip on reality.” [p80] Indeed, the intersection of the imaginal realm and the real is traversed by many people - some of whom are adept at repeating the traverse, while other intrepid voyagers into the imaginal fail to return to reality at all! Then, of course, there's the fact that what's real for some folks is unreal for others, which has become a primary tenet of postmodernism.
What is instructive is the extent to which the identity of some people is constructed, even if only partially, by fictional roles when acted out in real life. “Literary critics, philosophers, psychoanalysts, and all of us, in an ordinary, normal way, recognize that the power of fictions resides in their ability to promote identifications. Fictions are central to growth and creativity. But in the personality I am looking at, the identification has a completely different quality, seeming almost to amount to possession. The identification does not stop at resemblance – it becomes total, incorporating the violent and depressive aspects of the fictional character without self-examination, in a completely unscrutinized, indiscriminate manner. Fictions do not simulate life, they are a source of life.” [p81]
“By profession, actors and actresses must learn to play parts, shift shapes, take on roles. As far back as Plato's dialogue with the actor Ion, we know, the best players were able to fuse their personalities with their roles, so that the identity of person and role, not the gap between them, shone forth. Undoubtedly, a major influence upon the frequency, if not predominance, of fictive personality in the modern acting profession is related to the influence of the great theoretician of acting, Constantin Stanislavski. Again and again in his book An Actor Prepares and elsewhere, Stanislavski returned to the same theme, that an actor should “feel the situation of the person in a part so keenly... [that] he actually puts himself in the place of that person.” His insistence on confusing and fusing actor and role as well as character and person is fundamental to his method. When the actor finds his way into a role, Stanislavski writes, he “ceases to act, he begins to live the life of the play”... “For method acting,” a recent critic has written, “becoming the character was the whole point.” The Stanislavski method has been enormously influential”. “Are persons who become actors or actresses influenced psychologically by the continuous emphasis on becoming the parts they play in their profession? And does this bring them strongly into the sphere of the fictive personality? Or, are people (like Vonnegut's Harry) who have some prior pleasurable contact with fictive processes drawn especially toward certain professions, such as acting? The answer would seem to be yes to all the questions.” [p108/9]
“William Cody lived a life that was normal for a frontier scout until 1869, when the dime novelist and playwright Ned Buntline found him sleeping under a wagon and began to write about him as Buffalo Bill. Having become something of a celebrity through Buntline's works, Cody visited Chicago in 1872. Here, his career had a turning point. He was offered $500 a week “to play the part of Buffalo Bill myself,” “to represent my own character,” he writes in his autobiography. “I feared I would be a total failure,” he wrote. But eventually he did go on stage, and so began the remarkable transformation of Cody into `Buffalo Bill'. This unlettered plainsman, under the impact of the fictions he imitated, developed into a sophisticated, courtly hero. More and more he looked like General Custer. Eventually, in his Wild West Show, he `fought', with fake bullets and blunted arrows, the Indians he had once actually battled. By the end, he no longer seemed to know the difference, and in his old age when he wrote his autobiography, its hero was the fictional character invented long before by Buntline.” [p110/111]
“In 1979, an updated version of the same story made news. After decades of playing the Lone Ranger on radio and television, in films and circuses, Clayton Moore was obliged by the copyright owners to give up the part in favour of a younger replacement. He refused. He would not remove his mask – until at last a court decision forced him to drop his mask and, presumably, resume his `real' identity. But the Lone Ranger, he claimed, had become his true identity, displacing the original self.” Moore kept touring “wearing a mask-like pair of dark sunglasses” telling the crowds that he “fell in love with the character” and “it helped to make a better person of me... I tell the truth [according to] the Lone Ranger creed.” [p111]
“However, the performer who most clearly `acted' in order to exist as a `person' is Peter Sellers... For the most part, he didn't even identify with actual people, only with the parts played by actors. He was a fiction derived from fictions.” This was evidenced in the title of his 1969 biography - Peter Sellers: The Mask Behind The Mask. Sellers “told an interviewer for the Evening Standard that there's no such person as Peter Sellers... I have no personality as such of my own... I only exist as the various characters I create. They are more than me.”” [p118/9]
“Between films he lapsed into a sort of dazed nonexistence, trying to keep alive through expensive toys or social images. He was ready to adopt almost any role offered to him. Once, when a minor Indian actress came up to him and said she thought he “was the new messiah”, Sellers instantly responded to the new, grandiose role: “I even began to feel that I had developed the power to heal people”. Sellers went from one movie to another: 29 between 1958 and 1968. “Even when he suffered a series of heart attacks, he couldn't stop working: either way he faced death. The loss of a self, or the loss of life – what was the difference?” [p119]
“I think that fictive personality is involved in the whole range of behavior from normal to psychotic, from thought to emotions, passivity to aggression, creativity to destructiveness. Evidently, the process is a permanent element of human beings. It points to the capacity of people, chameleon-like, to use or be used by fictions, and to take on the costumes and shapes and colors of the psychic environment in which they operate. Fictions are fundamental in dreams, daydreams, aesthetic appreciation, meditations, adaption, wishes, defense, and many another human impulse. They are a crucial part of the human character, then – the part, especially, that expresses character traits through identification.” [p126]
“The use of fictions in character development or characteristic behavior is not pathological, and classical psychiatric or diagnostic categories, which start with the concept of pathology and character disorders, cannot give a good account of the nature and operations of fictive processes in character.” [p126]
Character types was a “conventional form in classical literature up to the 18th century”, writes Martin. “Joyce McDougall, in a work titled Theatres of the Mind, has proposed what is, in essence, a psychoanalytically informed, updated version of the classical study of character through its typologies or typical manifestations.” “As McDougall sees the situation, each mind is organized through a variety of internalized `theaters' or dramas.” [p127] Martin proceeds to quote McDougall at length:
“Each of us harbors in our inner universe a number of `characters', parts of ourselves that frequently operate in complete contradiction to one another, causing conflict and mental pain to our conscious selves. For we are relatively unacquainted with these hidden players and their roles. Whether we will it or not, our inner characters are constantly seeking a stage on which to play out their tragedies and comedies. Although we rarely assume responsibility for our secret theater productions, the producer is seated in our own minds. Moreover it is this inner world with its repeating repertory that determines most of what happens to us in the external world.” “Language informs us that the scriptwriter is called I. Psychoanalysis has taught us that the scenarios were written years ago by a naïve and childlike I struggling to survive in an adult world whose drama conventions are quite different from the child's. These psychic plays may be performed in the theater of our own minds or that of our bodies or may take place in the external world, sometimes using other peoples' minds and bodies, or even social institutions, as their stage.” [p128]
Martin comments on this: “Each self has a secret theater – rather like a magic theater in Herman Hesse's Steppenwolf – in which archaic assumptions, antique perspectives, clichéd emotions, like used furniture and leftover bric-a-brac, clutter the stage and, still connected to past roles, determine the actions of the present. Such theaters of the mind bring about the daily repetition of tragedies and comedies and romances played out many times before. At this most general level, then, the fictive processes may be seen as an organizer of the scenarios that drive behavior.” [p128/9]
Martin advocates combining this view with “the theory of fictions proposed by the philosopher Hans Vaihinger. Vaihinger's work is The Philosophy of `As If'. `Fictions', as he uses the term, are conceptions that, though they may refer to nonexistent entities and are never verifiable, are necessary to mental functioning. William of Occam called them ficta and acknowledged their practical necessity; Hobbes spoke of “Conscious Fictions” such as `equality' or `original contract'. But, according to Vaihinger, it was Kant, followed by Nietzsche, who most profoundly understood the necessity for fictions in mental operations. Fictions, he argues, are valuable and indispensable, even as they allow for the dangerous likelihood – even the inevitability – that they will become confused with reality.” Indeed, they are nowadays generally considered profound dimensions of our collective reality. In my college education in the early '60s, such concepts were categorized by our English teacher as `abstract nouns'. “In this analysis such concepts as `law', `freedom', `justice' and so on, are all fictions – constructs that are necessary to maintain social relations and achieve individual selfhood – even as they are acknowledged to be constructs or fictions.” [p129]
“Anna Freud is only one of several analysts who have described the defensive functions of fictive personality formations. The great psychoanalyst and critic Ernst Kris is another. Both defensive and also expressive of a life pattern is a syndrome described by Kris in 1956, in what he called the “personal myth”. He suggests that some patients fashion a myth – a secret, hidden life – out of their own autobiographical memories as these are shaped by early, unconscious fantasies. Their memories, that is, are reorganized by self-fictions rather than by experience and actuality and form a “protective screen”. Its apparently “firm outline and richness of detail are meant to cover significant omissions and distortions.” Such a myth is organized early, at a time when fantasy and reality are not sharply divided, then itself becomes an organizer of later experiences. Kris cites the case of a man who saw himself as a superman, “clearly recognizable as the idealized image of the father, whose role he has adopted in elevated stature.” Kris helps to point us to the fact that fictive personalities draw on what they can get: novels, plays, media – and even life, when necessary.” [p137]
Prominent analysts such as Kris and Kohut “defined pathological aspects of fictive personality processes; but each also pointed to the creative aspects of the use of good fictions. We are obliged to conclude that an infant or child who is badly disillusioned can experience herself or himself as fictive, and this can lead to various degrees of pathology. Contrariwise, a child who is disillusioned can `bounce back', be reillusioned and allowed to believe in good fictions again through good relations with loved ones and the appropriate satisfaction of fantasies. This process constitutes an early creative experience in dealing with the double character of fictions, `good' and `bad'... In anyone's life the process of illusioning, disillusioning, and reillusioning is fundamental to a world outlook. How one negotiates this complex process of illusions will influence, and perhaps determine, one's eventual perception of both reality and fictions, as well as the relation between them.” [p149/50]
So “fictions are an essential element in the process of growth and change. They are fundamental to maturation, since they provide a necessary arena for `trying on' identities and `trying out' relations to others. Yet, at every stage of development, experience with fictions is ambiguous. Not all fictions serve development; obviously, some fictions are 'good', while others are `bad'. `Good fictions' are variously named: `play', `experiment', `improvisation', `imagination', `hypothetical thinking', and `creativity'. `Self-deception', `delusional thinking', `impairment of reality testing', and `illusions' are the terms by which we characterize fictions that hinder or stunt growth and development. `Good fictions' are called `healthy' and `adaptive' because they tend to prepare us for action, compensate for loss, or make flexibility and inventiveness possible. `Bad fictions' are termed `neurotic' or even `psychotic' because they tend to lead to isolation, denial, or grandiosity; they make loss inevitable and block spontaneous experimentation.” [p152]
Martin tells the story of a boy, Jean, conceived as his father was dying slowly of a wasting disease. His mother's milk dried up, so she “sent the baby to a wet nurse”. He developed gastroenteritis, so the nurse weaned him early. “Then, when he was about one year old, his father died.” Back with his mother, he recovered “but was troubled by hallucinations and lack of trust”. Growing up with her in the house of his grandfather, who “doted on the boy”, Jean at age 4 “began to experience wanting to be like his grandfather. In external behavior he imitated him perfectly”. “He had a strong feeling of being an impostor, empty and unreal.” “He was, he felt, “a fake child”, lacking a soul... He became fascinated by silent movies; at home, alone, he played out all the roles he had seen on screen”. [p172/3]
“At the age of 7 he decided to lose the power of speech and remained mute for long periods.” Then, when at age 8 his grandfather (away on a trip) sent him a letter in verse, “the boy replied with a poem”. “He drove me into a new imposture that changed my life,” Jean later wrote. “I received by return mail a poem to my glory; I replied with a poem. The habit was formed; the grandfather and his grandson were united by a new bond.” [p174]
“Jean was given La Fontaine's Fables. He rewrote them in alexandrines, a difficult rhythmic scheme. Soon he began to write tales of adventure. He found he could easily enter the lives of others – so long as he himself had created these others – and that he had a knack for composing tales. He was writing stories, it turned out, not to escape from reality, but as a way of understanding it. Instead of simply swallowing others' stories he created his own, and through them he made his way to reality. Eventually, writing gave him a role in life and a relation to others, an audience. It taught him that his own psychic reality was fundamental, but that he had to account, in his creations of characters and in the response of his audience, for the psychic reality of others. At the age of 8, he says, by means of fiction “I was beginning to find myself... I was escaping from playacting... by writing I was existing.” All the information about Jean comes from Jean-Paul Sartre's autobiography, The Words (1964).” [p174/5]
“Sartre was the first writer to define the philosophy of existentialism, with its emphasis on the imaginary as the core of choice, in his 1945 lecture L'Existentialisme est un Humanisme... the existential quest, as Sartre outlined it, begins with the individual's journey into himself.” If he finds a “core of nothingness” within, he can can find a sense of being by acting freely nonetheless, rather than dwelling in despair. “Through his acts he creates his own essence and the character of a provisional reality. Each one of our acts, Sartre argues, creates “the man we would like to be ourselves”, as well as “an image of the man such as we think he ought to be”. This is basically a theory of fictions. When nothing exists, man can achieve meaning by acting `as if' meaning did exist. Revealed in the theory is the very structure of Sartre's own autobiography. When he learned that by creating fictions he could exist, then he became real, in his creativity, to himself. Through his own activity he achieved a reality that no one else could give him.” [p175/6]
George Patton became one of the first tank commanders during WWI, rising to the rank of Major General during WWII when his decisive attacks caused the top German military leaders to view him as the primary Allied threat. The biography cited by Jay Martin does indeed verify that Patton overcame tremendous defects & handicaps to deliberately make himself a successful warrior.
It took Georgie “a long time to learn to read. In fact, he had trouble learning anything. He had to read things over many times to be sure he understood what he was reading. He found it difficult to write, and could not seem to learn how to spell. He was unable to sit still for long, and his concentration was poor. Today we would call Georgie's problems `dyslexia' and `attention deficit disorder'... He was taken out of school and received individual attention at home... His dyslexia was still evident when he was in college. He also suffered from panic attacks and allergies whenever he had to take a test. Apparently Patton's father and mother presented him with appropriate role models for success, primarily members of his own family.” “Most of the male Pattons had been military men. Many had commanded in the Civil War, or, even earlier, in the Revolutionary War... All of these men were virtuous, courteous, brave, vigorous, efficient fighting men – in short, perfect role models for George as a boy. He pledged that he would be just like them, even if that meant extraordinary efforts. He had to learn to read and write... He had to learn to focus his attention (in order to receive and understand battle reports clearly). He had to learn to mask feelings of weakness (so as to inspire confidence in his men). He had to learn to take criticism... he had to overcome his shyness, and had to bend every effort toward making himself speak in public. In short, he had to remake himself.” [p178/9]
“In addition to the identifications that he developed with a large number of dead military heroes in the family, and from the books his father chose for him (often reading these books to him), Patton added his own group of warriors. His favourites appeared in Walter Scott's novels, in The Iliad and The Odyssey, in Shakespeare's tragedies, in the Old Testament, and in the books of Kipling. All provided him with a strong masculine model... Patton's biographer, Martin Blumenson, writes: “The stories had a strong impact. They induced in him a strain of mysticism, a sense of deja vu, and acceptance of telepathy, and a belief in reincarnation, the feeling that he had lived before in other historical periods, always a soldier – a Greek hoplite, a Roman legionnaire, a cavalryman with Belisarius, a highlander with the House of Stuart, a trooper with Napoleon and Murat.” … From all of these, Patton transformed `Georgie' into General George Smith Patton. In the process, he developed a fine sense of the theatrical. His military actions were deliberately organized as scenarios. He wrote that “the leader must be an actor” and is “unconvincing unless he lives his part”. [p180]
“All his life he honed his personal image, developing what he felt were the appropriate mannerisms – profanity in language, aristocratic bearing, a contemptuous scowl, ruthlessness. For long hours he practiced before a mirror to achieve fierce facial expressions. He spoke often about `my destiny', and became well-known for his theatrical displays. With his pearl-handled revolvers and leather jacket, he cut a flamboyant military figure. He flew into well-publicized fits of anger at soldiers who lacked the fighting spirit. He made brilliant use of public relations media. He was grandiloquent and grandiose.” “Patton relied on such identifications to provide him with a stable image of success and he used his concept of destiny to conceal his partly-conscious anguish that, after all, he might be weak, deficient, and purposeless.” [p180/1]
“William Faulkner's life offers a superb example of the downs and ups of creativity and its alliance with fictions of all sorts. For most of his youth and early manhood, Faulkner considered himself a fraud. He felt that he was impotent as a person, and that it was necessary to be an impostor. If he was to preserve a sense of self at all, it would have to be as a fiction. Yet, for all this, Faulkner finally found an authentic self and an original voice, and became, in the opinion of many, America's greatest novelist.” [p187]
A “double view of himself was reflected in the use of two names.” Born Falkner, 'he changed his surname to Faulkner when he reached maturity.” His historical self he called `a simple skeleton', and his alter ego “was born of a Negro and an alligator” - these two identities would seem to be the two sides of his creativity: the impulsive side, and the shaping side, which was formal, courteous, and controlled.” [p188] As a child he was influenced by a black woman, Mammy, who “became an important member of the family” and “was a good storyteller.” His brother Murray remembered how William “began to tell tales of his own. They were good ones, too. Some of them even stopped Mammy, and she was a past master in the field if ever there was one.”” [p191]
However William seems to have become neurotic as a teenager due to internalizing the conflict between his parents. Their “marriage was filled with tension and division. Whenever he moved toward identifying with either parent, he disappointed one and lost part of himself.” His mother was a strict disciplinarian: deciding that William was becoming stoop-shouldered, she obtained a brace for him “Like a corset... two padded armholes” the back “stiffened with whalebone and laced cross-wise with a heavy white cord. Each morning she laced him into his harness; she was the only person allowed to unlace it at day's end.” “Despondency and inactivity took hold... He wouldn't go to school and refused to work.” [p193]
Later he was betrothed to his sweeheart Estelle, but in 1918 she returned his ring and married a naval officer. Faulkner figured he had to become an officer too, but was rejected by the US Air Force. Then he applied to the Canadian Royal Flying Corps, creating “a fictive genealogy for himself” with an English mother. He did several months of training before the Armistice, then “was mustered out of service” before he had a chance to fly. He returned home with a limp, told people “he had crashed” and “began to construct an elaborate story about his war injury”. After a while the “limp disappeared, but when he went to New York in 1921 it `reappeared'. Again, in 1924, it `came back' in New Orleans.” He met several other writers, to whom he added a head wound. “He intimated that with a silver plate in his head, he couldn't be expected to live long... Faulkner's stories of injuries, though `untrue', were his real truths.” He continued to wear his uniform. “Even as late as the 1950s he frequently donned a hand-tailored, double-breasted, brass-buttoned, and red silk-lined CRFC blue dress jacket... He wore his (unearned) pilot's wings even on his scoutmaster's uniform. Faulkner seemed to feel no guilt over these deceptions. Indeed, he was pathologically addicted to them; they got him the attention and admiration that he craved.” [p194-6]
In 1927 he described himself to Who's Who in America as “Falkner, William (surname originally Falkner)” - this was noted by his biographer Blotner as a “curious reversal” (of reality). Reversion to his real name seems to have been an identity switch due to Estelle returning after divorcing her husband, then agreeing to marry him. “He could start to become himself.” [p197]
The transformation “gave him back a part of himself that had seemed lost.” He'd authored 2 novels as Faulkner, but suddenly dropped a third already in manuscript, instead starting another “Sartoris. This was a seminal work... He suddenly realised, too, that to make his work “evocative... it must be personal,” and he created characters reconciling the ideal with the real “composed partly from what they were in actual life and partly from what they should have been and were not.” He thus regained his optimism – as he put it, he “improved on God”.” [p198]
“From this point forward Faulkner experienced a personality in his writing that seemed new to him, though it was connected to his oldest self, and he began to make the claim that he was different from his books, that Faulkner, not Falkner, was real. He defended this fiction by personal concealment, and by hiding his original deceptions. He accomplished this through isolation and myth-making. His chief myth was that his life didn't count in his work.” [p199]
“Television, of course, has been the prime instrument in promoting the rapid increase of fictions. In particular, it puts heavy stress on aggressive relations. Between the ages of 5 and 14, according to media expert Otto Larsen, “the average American child has witnessed the violent destruction of 13,oo0 human beings on television alone.” … An average of 5 acts of violence occur per prime-time hour, but on the weekend 20 violent acts are seen per hour on daytime children's programs.” [p221/2]
Martin refers to more than 3,000 publications resulting from studies commissioned by the US government following the 1972 Report of the Surgeon General's Advisory Committee on Television and Behaviour. “The surprising result of these studies and many others is that the fundamental correlation is not between aggressive behavior and the viewing of violence on TV; increase in aggression correlates with viewing television, not with viewing violent scenes. The process of viewing is the main factor in causing psychic and behavioral change.” “Though books have always inspired identifications, television seems to bypass control of the ego, encouraging unmediated identification with the image. This is exactly what John Hinckley claimed (without any reflection on his own disordered behavior) when he wrote to the editors of Newsweek: “Watching too much television can cause numerous social disorders. The damn TV is on all day and night in most homes... a fantasy world tends to develop the longer a person stays in front of the tube.” Study after study has found that people of all ages, but particularly children, have difficulty distinguishing what is “real on television”, and this has profound consequences for the development of a sense of reality in children.” [p223-6]
“Very soon children learn that what they believed was real is only illusion.” Thus a new cultural norm originates. “Children learn to follow `scripts' rather than test reality, and they are often bitterly disappointed when reality upsets the scripts they have learnt.” “Our society imitates the fiction that everything is a fiction. This can be observed at the core of personality and social relations.” [p228]
“Christopher Lasch characterized contemporary society as the `culture of narcissism'. His analysis is acute and deserves widespread recognition. Narcissism – a developmental deficit resulting from inadequate early mirroring – is causally in the background of our culture, but it is derivative and not the informing drive of the culture itself. Narcissism is merely one way of describing a personality that has become fictional to itself and seeks reflections in every glass... Our society is composed according to the belief that the self is fictive, society is theater, and events have no meaning beyond their performances. Anyone can be or become anything, because all is fraudulent and everyone is an impostor... Indeed, contemporary culture seems pervaded by fictions. What we are seeing – what I have been describing – is the transformation of the individual and society through the fictions infused into both. Fictive personality is the psychology of our time. Fictive social relations dominate our culture.” [p228/9]
The book concludes with a final case study from the author's professional career as therapist. “My patient Mack's treatment appeared to be going nowhere. Every time he seemed about to reveal a clue to his personality and I made a comment, he would respond flatly: “Don't you know I'm a Martian?” … Then, one evening as I sat watching television, I began to see what he meant. As I watched a dramatization of a segment of Ray Bradbury's novel The Martian Chronicles, I saw what Mack felt about himself. In Bradbury's book, the crucial episode occurs” when an old couple, grieving the loss of their son Tom, are stunned by his re-appearance - he had died, and they had seen him buried. When they question him, he can't explain himself but wants them to accept him. The father can't: “Who are you really? You can't be Tom... You're a Martian, aren't you? I've heard tales... about how rare Martians are, and when they come among us they come as Earth Men. There's something about you – you're Tom and yet you're not.” Tom is upset by this but when they accept him and later take him to town he disappears. Later, they hear of a lost female child that has been found by another grieving couple. “The old man seeks out the girl, knowing and fearing what he will find. Yes, the girl explains, she was Tom: now she is Lavinia. She was Tom when the old couple's desire shaped her so; now she has an identity that responds to another's desire.” ...Mack was playing the role of the perfect analysand, but occasionally he had told me in secret language that it was a role, and I was analyzing a fiction. He had read Ray Bradbury – but long before his reading he knew all too well what it was like to be a shape-shifting Martian.” [p230-2] Shape-shifting between identities can be a useful survival strategy when done as the situation requires!
Once Jay Martin had told Mack he'd seen the Martian story and realised its relevance “he started to dredge up childhood memories, old associations, fragments of wishes, dreams, daydreams, former hurts. Once I had encountered and perhaps even accepted the Martian in him, he revealed glimpses of a real self. His case is like those of many another person treated in this book. He saved himself by learning how to play parts assigned to him. Now he is still learning how to be someone other than a Martian – ultimately, to be himself.” [p233] Therapy can succeed by integrating one's identities.
Martin concludes with this observation: “It is neither possible nor desirable to dispense with fictions. But to possess only fictions means to be possessed by them. However many roles we play for others, we must play as few as possible for ourselves.” This then is the therapist's cure: self-realisation is best achieved by making a real self. If someone is occupying a role which threatens to become permanent, it will not bode well for their future if that role is unconnected to their authentic self. However much they identify with it, it will likely work better for them if therapist, friend or family help them to integrate that identity with the person they grew up as, and/or are deep down. Many of us have a portfolio of identities, between which we shape-shift with ease as our circumstances and situations change, but few of us become conscious of the portfolio or the process of shape-shifting. Think about it; do you act differently to different people? Do you present a different identity at work to the one at home? Do you know anyone who has a character so consistent that they act the same no matter who they're with, or what situation they find themselves in?
I suspect Jay Martin has delineated an attribute of the psyche that psychologists have failed to identify; one fundamental to human nature. Our character is dual - part imaginal, part real. Our personality reflects this duality. Sometimes it exhibits a fictive identity, other times we need to get real. Life's too grim for reality to be our sole option: to survive we need choices. So remember this when real life puts you in a bind; you need but to imagine an alternative, and shape-shift out of there!
