One extraordinary example: someone whom I liked very much, told of the lands, money and titles that she would soon receive from the new government in Hungary. Most had, of course, never had either title or lands. They would normally tell everyone that they would be rich and titled once the “communists” returned his or her lands. I’ve known countless people who have claimed to have noble blood from some obscure part of the former Eastern Europe. They believe that their lives are humdrum and boring, never realizing what an enormous gift it is to be alive at all. The Walter Mitty syndrome is clearly related: people use fantasy to escape from their normal lives. Regular readers might remember that in a post in April, I examined pathological lying from physical, psychological, social, subtle and spiritual perspectives. He has become such a standard for the role that his name appears in several dictionaries. Mitty was a meek, mild man with a vivid fantasy life: in a few dozen paragraphs he imagined himself a wartime pilot, an emergency-room surgeon, and a devil-may-care killer. Walter Mitty was a a fictional character in James Thurber’s short story The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, published in 1941.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |