cover image Who Am I This Time?: Uncovering the Fictive Personality

Who Am I This Time?: Uncovering the Fictive Personality

Jay Martin. W. W. Norton & Company, $18.95 (255pp) ISBN 978-0-393-02525-5

Mark David Chapman, killer of John Lennon, identified with the ex-Beatle and married a Japanese-American, as had Lennon. John Hinckley, President Reagan's would-be assassin, modeled himself on the hero of the movie Taxi Driver. Both criminals filled their empty interior lives with fictive personalities, yet, according to California psychoanalyst Martin, we all do so to some extent. Author of books on Henry Miller and Robert Lowell, Martin tells of one patient who identified with the Lone Ranger, another with Dorothy of The Wizard of Oz. He illustrates the power of the fictive self with material drawn from lives as diverse as victim Patty Hearst, Arab terrorists and actors who unconsciously adopt their characters' mannerisms offstage. The author defines his terms so vaguely, however, and casts his theoretical net so widely, that he catches very few fish, factual or fictive. (March)