‘Fictive Personalities’ : Author Looks for the Character in All of Us

Which of the paragraphs below describes Mark David Chapman, killer of musician John Lennon, and which pertains to Nobel Prize-winning novelist William Faulkner?

--”For most of his youth and early manhood, (he) considered himself a fraud. He felt he was impotent as a person, and that it was necessary to be an imposter. If he was to preserve a sense of self at all, it would have to be as a fiction.”

--”Piece by piece, from his childhood on, (he) stitched together a crazy quilt of fictions--fragments, remnants, odds and ends. . . .”

As it happens, the first describes Faulkner and the second Chapman. But the similarities, according to psychoanalyst Jay Martin, who wrote the descriptions, are far from coincidental.

A Common Thread

In fact, Martin said he has found a common thread in the lives of not only Faulkner and Chapman, but also such disparate people as Gen. George S. Patton, Jean-Paul Sartre, the terrorist Carlos, Patty Hearst, would-be presidential assassin John Hinckley Jr., “Lone Ranger” actor Clayton Moore, actor Peter Sellers and William (Buffalo Bill) Cody.

According to Martin, a USC English professor, all of them, and less famous people as well, have adopted “fictive personalities,” taking on aspects of fictional characters to compensate for deficiencies in themselves. He presents his arguments in a new book, “Who Am I This Time? Uncovering the Fictive Personality” (Norton: $18.95).

Playing a Part

In a media-glutted society, Martin contends, everyone adopts fictive characteristics, but the degree of involvement varies. The popularity of contemporary television and film characters--many of them beautiful or powerful--makes for a world in which “real people have less talent, are less interesting,” he said, and where “it’s important to play a part to be authentic.”

The unprecedented number of modern-day fictions has created a topsy-turvy condition, he said. “We know about Oliver North’s house and Sylvester Stallone’s divorce and the dog on ‘The Jeffersons.’ We know intimately hundreds of characters from television and the movies. And we may know 30 or 40 people in our daily lives--probably not as many as people in a traditional village would know.”

“Society has always had artificial relations and real relations,” Martin said. “Historically, the artificial ones were the gods, characters out of myth and so on.”

Few in number, they served for the most part to perpetrate tradition and social order and were outnumbered by real relations, he said. In contemporary society, the proportions have completely reversed, he believes: “Most of our relations are artificial. This induces a state where the fictive is more real.”

In his book, Martin recounts the widely documented confusion that Chapman and Hinckley had with fictional characters--Chapman with Holden Caulfield in J. D. Salinger’s novel, “The Catcher in the Rye,” and Hinckley with Travis Bickle played by Robert De Niro in the movie “Taxi Driver.” Chapman and Hinckley are extreme examples of people with personalities so insubstantial, Martin said, they readily take on identities from fiction.

Similarly, Faulkner had various fictive personalities, including that of a virile, uncultured woodsman and an aristocratic, English-born flying ace, said Martin. As a young man the novelist affected a limp, the result of an injury in a fabricated World War I plane crash.

“Faulkner seemed to feel no guilt over these deceptions,” Martin writes. “Indeed, he was pathologically addicted to them; they got him the attention and admiration he craved.”

Leo S. Bing professor of English at USC, Martin also earned a doctorate in psychoanalysis from the Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute at USC and counsels 20 or more patients a week.

About 10% of them, he said, “show a personality disorder that has to do with taking on fictions so that they exist within them like a foreign body.”

The author of five other books of biography and criticism, Martin believes it is an increasingly common psychological phenomenon, and that television is responsible for what he describes as the fictive epidemic.

Passivity of TV

“Television watching makes you so passive, the passivity itself decreases attention to anything creative or anything that establishes a self,” he said. “It induces us to identify passively with whatever’s on TV. If violence is on, there is an increase in identification with violence.”

In the case of Clayton Moore, he cites the actor’s lengthy, successful court fight to retain the right to wear the Lone Ranger’s mask. Moore claimed at the time the Lone Ranger “had become his true identify, displacing his original self,” writes Martin.

Asked about this, Moore, 73, said: “I believe that Clayton Moore and the Lone Ranger have become one and the same. I stand for fair play, justice and law and order.” He declined to elaborate.

Moore, writes Martin, is like William Cody, who over the years replaced his own identity with a more attractive role. A scout in the American West, Cody was used by dime-novelist Ned Buntline as a model for the character Buffalo Bill. By the end of his life, Cody “no longer seemed to know the difference” between himself and the fictional hero, Martin said.

For others, such as Gen. George S. Patton and philosopher-writer Jean Paul Sartre, the fictive personality is taken on earlier in life and eventually may be used to overcome psychological paralysis.

Martin writes that Patton had dyslexia and “attention-deficit disorder” as a child, learning slowly and suffering embarrassments in school. Shyness and fear resulted. To overcome them and feel whole, said Martin, young Patton emulated military heroes from his family and from works by Walter Scott, Homer, Shakespeare and Kipling.

“During World War II Patton swore that he could actually smell the sweat of Caesar’s legionnaires, for he had been one of them . . . on this or that very spot,” writes Martin. “Patton relied on such identifications to provide him with a stable of inner images 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.”

Creating His Own Fictions

The young Sartre, said Martin, was emotionally scarred by the death of his father and took on fictions from silent movies for escape. Although for years he was “an imposter, empty and unreal,” Sartre eventually took up writing and began to create fictions rather than merely assuming them. The result, said Martin, was the building of a personality.

“Particularly in early life, when self-confidence is shaken by trauma or when trust in others is shattered, a vacuum of attachment will result,” he writes. “At this point, early fantasy and fictions tend to rush to ‘fill in’ the deficit. . . . 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.”

Douglas Powell, a psychologist and lecturer at Harvard University, said the fictive personalities Martin ascribes to Sartre and Faulkner sound like examples of what he terms compensatory fantasies. Powell, author of “Teen-Agers: When to Worry and What to Do,” said it is important to distinguish between different mental conditions that may have a surface resemblance.

Emphasizing that he has not read Martin’s book, Powell said one person cited, Patty Hearst, suffered from “identification with an aggressor” during her kidnaping, a “totally different phenomenon” from compensatory fantasies. Both are different, still, from those who believe they are characters out of fiction, Powell said.

Although the term fictive personality lacks precision, Powell said Martin “may have hit on a useful diagnostic tool” that could help a therapist to understand a patient by exploring the patient’s fictive self.

Psychologist Stanley Gochman, a professor at American University in Washington who has studied assassins, warned about the tendency to oversimplify when analyzing people such as Chapman and Hinckley. Drug use was a significant part of the problem in Chapman’s case, Gochman said, while Hinckley’s medical records remain sealed by the court, making it impossible to know how completely he took on a Travis Bickle role.

Darwin Dorr, director of clinical psychology at Highland Hospital in Asheville, N.C., who specializes in personality disorders, uses the term as-if person to describe Martin’s fictive personality.

Increasing Phenomenon

Both men credit a number of researchers with exploring the role that fiction plays in personality development. And like Martin, Dorr believes emulating fictional characters is on the increase.

“It’s not really genuine--you sort of put on a personality like a coat,” said Dorr. “It’s a personality disorder, a deficiency in identity. It’s been said that the normal, average person is roughly the same today as yesterday and will be roughly the same tomorrow, but with these kinds of people, their identity changes with the wind.”

He, too, believes the sheer volume of entertainment--the source of today’s fictions--has made people less creative and appreciative of art.

“I sometimes compare a child who hears a magnificent symphony today to a farm girl in Iowa 150 years ago who is trying to make a doll, because she doesn’t have one,” Dorr said. “Maybe she uses an apple for the head, and maybe it doesn’t come out very well. Still, that child may learn more about art because it’s an interactive process. Today, even the fantasy is supplied to you when you watch MTV.”

Although Martin concentrates on the darker side of the so-called fictive personalities, he said that mentally healthy people also adopt them. A sign that the process is healthy, he said, is the ability to turn the fictive personality on and off at will.

Sean Wright of Hollywood, for example, is fascinated with the Sherlock Holmes. He founded and heads the Non-Canonical Calabashes, a group that studies and reenacts the Sherlock Holmes stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Wright, 37, said he enjoys playing Holmes, using the fictional detective’s techniques, especially an ear for accents, to dazzle people.

Wright said he offered to help the Los Angeles Police Department during the Skid Row Slasher case, having pieced together a hypothetical profile of the killer from news accounts. Investigators refused the offer.

“It’s the greatest conceit of man to believe that he’s the rational, reasonable creature,” said Wright of the Holmes persona he enjoys assuming. “Everyone likes to solve puzzles, which is why mysteries are so popular. I like to think that I can think things through.”

Then there is real estate salesman James R. Gary, who several times a year puts on a kilt and plays at being a Scotsman at Highland games around the state. Gary’s Woodland Hills office is the architectural likeness of a Scottish Georgian mansion, and he also sponsors a bagpipe band.

“I love to be thought of as the Laird of the Glenn,” said Gary, who added that he also admires the qualities of “frugality and hard work and making money” and tries to incorporate them into his life. He laughed, however, at the idea that he might have confused his identity with a fictional Scotsman’s.

The same is true of Donald Reed of Los Angeles, president and founder of the 25-year-old Count Dracula Society. Reed, who also is president of the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror, said he studies Dracula but does not identify with him. But not all Dracula fans make such a clear distinction, he said, citing a young man in Chicago who filed his teeth to more resemble the vampire.

Complexes and Syndromes

The fictive personality is different from complexes or syndromes named for Oedipus, Narcissus, Pollyanna and the like, Martin said.

“Those are names for collections of behaviors,” he said, while the fictive personality phenomenon is a process of psychological development.

He said the earliest example can be found in Cervantes’ character Don Quixote, who is obsessed with the literature of chivalry, sells his estate and becomes a knight.

Many actors feel most real when taking on fictive personalities, writes Martin, who cites Peter Sellers as an extreme example.

“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.”

Women are also susceptible to fictive personas. Martin cites Dorothy from “The Wizard of Oz” and the space traveler Ripley played by Sigourney Weaver in “Alien” and “Aliens” as indomitable characters which appeal to women who are frightened by feelings of vulnerability.

But styling one’s personality after even the gentle Dorothy can be destructive, he said. “The more you are fictive, the less you are sharing in others’ lives and the more you are isolated.”