First, let me thank Sharon Sergeant, who is becoming a pen pal and periodic conversant, for her stunning first guest article on the Misha Defonseca story; there will be more. I can't think of a more interesting topic for all writers and readers. She just so happens to reside in my home state of Massachusetts so when we talk, I catch up on my former turf.
Turning our attention to the subject at hand, Misha Defonseca, David Shields, writing for the one of the best alternative rags in America, The Stranger, lumps Eliot Spitzer, Margaret Seltzer and Misha together in his psycho/culture article entitled Vertigo. He posits, "Everyone's ambition is underwritten by a tragic flaw." He quotes Freud, "What lives wants to die again," and invokes Sophocles, "Even though you knew it would cost you your eyes..." Finally and unfortunately, Shields leaves us with the psycho-physical death wish as our common fate. Shields appropriately entitles his article Vertigo, a disorder of balance; however, the exposed narcissist risks falling in to the water from where the reflection of reality originated. It is his tragic fate. There is hope; it is not our common one.
In my opinion, mythology and psychology offer better explanation of individuals like Misha Defonseca, and perhaps, a more hopeful common fate. You all know the myth of Narcissus and the concept of narcissism: look in the water, see your reflection, and fall in love with your reflection, substituting for the real you, the water and the world. As we develop personalities, a small measure of narcissism is part of the recipe for a healthy personality; a larger hit--too much of a good thing--helps contruct the narcissistic personality. Sandor Ferenczi's work describes the development of this personality in detail, including the moment when wishing overcomes reason and the individual begins to believe that wanting something to be real makes it real. At this precise moment, the symbolic reflection of the self in the water transforms and generalizes to other symbols that the narcissistic individual identifies with the "reflected self:" i.e. power, success (one's novel published, ) sex, and money. Finally, this symbolic unembodied life is substituted for a real self.
To understand the writer who fakes a memoir, one must grasp this mythological/psychological concept of narcissism, its logical extension, the narcissitic personality, and the narcissitic culture-- phylogeny recapitulates ontogeny. Social Historian Christopher Lasch "The Culture of Narcissism" coined the narcissistic culture as a society in which every activity and relationship is defined by the acquisition of symbols of wealth. These symbols, materialistic and spiritual, are disconnected from any real capacity to actually nourish the physical or spiritual appetites; they are symbols, and therefor, they cannot be consumed. Faking a memoir is a narcissistic effort to live in a fictional symbolic creation of oneself; it is, however, no more narcissistic than anything gained at the expense of the truth. Looking around at the culture we live in, the list is large. We will blog again ...
Sharon Sergeant