SOURCE: “Introduction,” in The Family Romance of Imposter-Poet Thomas Chatterton, Macmillan-Atheneum, 1987, pp. 1-11.

[In the following essay, Kaplan provides a psychoanalytic portrait of Chatterton, describing him as a “typical, if extreme,” adolescent who was also haunted by the absence of a father who died before he was born. Chatterton, the critic notes, spent his short life searching for his father in the form of the medieval personages that he fabricated.]

Thomas Chatterton was in many ways a typical adolescent. During the seventeen years of his life, he was an exuberant player in the artistic, intellectual, religious, political, and sexual adventures we have come to expect of not-quite-adults. Even his suicide marked him as a typical, if extreme, example of the Sturm und Drang image of adolescence. But he was not merely an ordinary adolescent. He was an impostor, and indeed he grew up in the precise family environment that is believed to promote imposturousness. He was a fatherless boy raised by an adoring, idealizing mother and sister, both of whom encouraged his tendencies toward grandiosity and exceptionality. Chatterton was an artistically gifted boy whose poetic talents flourished during adolescence.

In fact I came to Chatterton through my work on adolescence. While sorting out my research and notes for the concluding sections of my last book, Adolescence, I thought that Thomas Chatterton, the now nearly forgotten eighteenth-century poet who became an emblem for the English romantic movement, would be the ideal figure to represent the prototypically male disorder, the impostor. However, as I looked further into the circumstances of his life history, I found that his imposturous deeds and indeed his character were far more out of the ordinary than I had expected. I had imagined impostor types to be more straightfoward—obvious con men and manipulators. But Chatterton was different. In the first place, he was not even a genuine plagiarizer. A plagiarizer imitates or appropriates the writings of another person and represents them as his own original work. He is a pure and simple faker, whose motives of financial reward and personal aggrandizement are relatively uncomplicated. But Chatterton actually wrote the poems that he pretended were written by a fifteenth-century priest. He never took on the identity of another person the way a true impostor would. Furthermore, it was nearly impossible to discern where his genuine artistic passions left off and his criminal impulses began.

Felix Krull, Thomas Mann's brilliantly realized fictional confidence man, an out-and-out liar, cheat, and plagiarizer, was decidedly better suited to my immediate purposes. Some of the ambiguities in Chatterton's character are also present in Krull. As Mann commented on his novel, “It is in essence the story of an artist; in it the element of the unreal and illusional passes frankly over into the criminal.” But despite this general ambiguity, Mann's fictional confidence man exemplifies with greater clarity the language and mentality of the criminal than could Thomas Chatterton, who never quite grasped the criminal nature of his poetic enterprise and who never had a Thomas Mann to give artistic shape to his confused mental life.

Krull was the example I selected to use in Adolescence, but I could not abandon Chatterton. I had grown attached to him and wanted to give him a book of his own, a biography that would do justice to the richness and complexity of his life, particularly to the peculiar relationship between artistic creation and falsehood that is expressed in his literary endeavors. I was intrigued by the dilemmas of his moral character, his motives for writing imposturous poetry, and the external circumstances and internal motives surrounding his suicide.

Another facet of Chatterton's imposturousness commanded my attention. Obviously, a man who pretends to be another man has an uncertain sense of personal identity. What is not so obvious is that underlying that manifest uncertainty of selfhood is a fragility of masculine gender identity. As psychoanalysts have come to appreciate, an impostor's sexual orientation is as ambiguous as his moral orientation. The sexual dilemmas are not whether the impostor's sexual orientation is homosexual or heterosexual; the dilemmas concern the perverse quality of his relationships with his sexual partners, whether they are male or female. Impostors are predisposed to acquiring sexual perversions such as sadomasochism, transvestism, fetishism, exhibitionism, voyeurism. And when they become involved in less-complicated sexual relations with women they nevertheless are pseudogenital in the psychological sense; that is, while they are able to employ their penises without ritualized or manifestly perverse scenarios, they emphasize scoring, performance, orgasm in the partner not as the giving of pleasure but as vanquishment and defeat. They view erection as risk, enmity, deception, survival.

Unlike Felix Krull, who we are told courts and seduces married and unmarried women, Thomas Chatterton's actual sexual behavior remains a mystery. He was rumored to be a profligate, a libertine, far too enamored of too many of the young ladies in his Bristol neighborhood, far too well acquainted with the mantua-makers and dulcineas of London. One widespread theory had it that he committed suicide because he was afflicted with syphilis or perhaps an untreatable gonorrhea.

What is certain is that under his own identity he wrote a few scandalous works, among them an obscene poem celebrating the size and marvelous abilities of an exhibitionist's penis and a doggerel verse deriding a capacious vagina and that in the last year of his life he wrote as a freethinker on all matters—religious, political, social, and sexual. Though some critics would cite these writings as evidence of Chatterton's sexual perversions, such “wild” hypotheses are unfounded. The significant issues concern the unique and puzzling relationships between Chatterton's acknowledged freethinking writings and the conflicts expressed in his imposturous works, which were noble, pure, and saintly.

My special interest in the relationships among artistic creation, falsehood, and perversion, which Chatterton's life illustrates, began in my clinical work where many years ago I encountered several overtly perverse patients who were simultaneously caught up in various fabrications of reality—pathological lying, hoaxing, plagiarism, swindling. About fifteen years ago, I took into treatment a nine-year-old boy who, quite unknown to anyone in his family, was consumed by a secret voyeuristic involvement with the live-in housekeeper, an attractive forty-year-old woman who was unconsciously seductive toward my patient. It was not until the second year of analysis that my patient alerted me to his voyeurism.

From the beginning I worked with the boy to modulate the severe anxieties that had brought him into treatment. He was terrified that his parents would abandon him. His day-fantasies and dream life were haunted by outer-space creatures that were poised to hack off, burn off, or otherwise mutilate his arms, legs, ears, eyes, and penis. The year after my patient and I began to address the connection between his voyeurism and these terrifying abandonment and mutilation anxieties, puberty arrived, and the surface clinical picture altered. His overt perversion diminished considerably. His anxieties became more manageable. For some time thereafter, however, his considerable intellectual and creative energies were put in the service of convincing me, his teachers, and his family that events that were untrue were true. He had become a pathological liar. At that juncture, I remembered something crucial about the relationship between perversion and pathological lying. Otto Fenichel, a disciple of Freud's, put it: “If it is possible to make someone believe that untrue things are true, then it is also possible for true things, the memory of which threatens me, are untrue.”

Sexual perversions in men center on a fear of the female genitals. The true things that are to be falsified are the penisless female genitals—the vagina, the labia, the tiny erect clitoris. Pathological lying and imposturousness can make these undeniably true facts of life at least momentarily deniable, Petty lies, hoaxes, practical jokes, plagiarisms, and imposturous acts—known as character perversions—originate in the same anxieties and serve similar purposes as manifestly sexual perversions such as fetishism, voyeurism, exhibitionism, transvestism. The analyst Jacob Arlow, who first identified the perverse nature of these denials of reality, illustrated the connections between character perversions and sexual perversions:

The petty lie is the equivalent of the fetish—it is something which is interposed between the individual and reality in order to ward off the perception of true reality and to substitute instead perceptions which facilitate ambiguity and illusion, both of which can temper for the patient the harsh reality of female anatomy.

Coincidentally, during the same period I was engaged in a prolonged diagnostic evaluation of a five-year-old boy who was in analysis with a colleague of mine. The boy demonstrated a conscious wish to be a girl and an impulse to dress up in his mother's clothing—an impulse that he resisted valiantly but his mother subtly encouraged.

I was struck by the similarities in family background and psychological dynamics of these two boys. The prominent features of each developmental history were an absent or absentee father and a mother who had unsettled the child's narcissistic balance by inviting the fantasy that he had the power to gratify her every wish and desire and eventually fulfill her own exalted version of masculinity. When the exalted maternal ideal of masculinity replaces or overshadows the masculine ideal as represented by the father, this produces the emotional hothouse in which manifest perversions and character perversions, including certain failures of identification such as imposturousness, seem to flourish.

Literary imposture occupies its own niche within imposturousness. It flourished in England during the eighteenth century. The century started off with George Psalmanazar, a French impostor who, in his mid-twenties, came to London posing as a native of Formosa and after translating the Anglican catechism into Formosan, a language he invented, produced (in Latin) the totally fictitious Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa. At the century's end, William Henry Ireland fabricated two “lost” Shakespearean plays, Vortigern and Rowena, and Henry II. And in between were literally scores of others.

The masks of the literary impostors of the eighteenth century were diverse; some were manufacturers of fake legal documents, some printers of spurious books, some tellers of false tales, some creators of some form of false literature. But as I have pointed out, the literary impostor is not, strictly speaking, a plagiarizer. He is more complex in that he represents his own hard-won labors as having originated in someone else's mind. He claims to bring lost documents to light, and in so doing dupes the world into believing that something which is not true is true.

Thomas Chatterton, one of the more famous eighteenth-century impostor-poets, can be distinguished from his fellow literary impostors by the poetic verisimilitude he brought to the long-ago past that he invented. An interpretative reading of Psalmanazar's exotic Formosa or James Macpherson's glorified Irish heroes might also reveal a psychological longing for an ideal father figure. But Chatterton's fabrication of the fifteenth-century Sir William Canynge, the noble merchant prince through whom he tried to fill in the gaps in his own identity, represents a longing for a father that is startlingly transparent. As I embark on this full narrative of that young man's literary exploits and brief, tragic life, I hope that my explorations will enrich the psychoanalytic perspective on the dynamic relationships among creativity, falsehood, and perversion. I hope also that I can communicate to readers outside the psychoanalytic profession something of the richness of the psychoanalytic version of the relationship between sexuality and morality.

While I have not yet made explicit the two main themes of this narrative on the life of Thomas Chatterton, it must already be apparent that I am speaking of imposturousness as a male rather than a female disorder. In the course of relating the tale of this young man's life, I shall be exploring the psychological ramifications of the absence (and by extension of the presence) of a father in a boy's life.

One of my motives in writing about a father-son relationship was to redress the balance at a time when at last so many women writers have been appreciating the depth and meaning of the mother-daughter bond. Since female relationships play so large a part in the upbringing of impostors and impostor-poets, I will be inquiring into mother-son, sister-brother bonds and what these might mean in the father's absence. But my major emphasis will be on the longing for a father, a universal human longing that is all the more significant because we have begun to live in a father-absent culture, where large numbers of boys and girls are being raised in households made fatherless by illegitimacy, abandonment, divorce, and most recently the decision of women to bear and bring up children as single parents. Lest I give the impression that this turn of events might hasten us toward a matriarchal paradise, I want to underline that I am exploring not a positive or potentially beneficial phenomenon but the detrimental effects of an absence.

The week I was preparing this introduction, Stanley Kunitz published an article for the New York Times Book Review entitled “The Poet's Quest for the Father,” in which he concludes:

Out of 20th century American poetry emerges, as a collective creation, the mythic image of the absent father. His absence explains why he haunts the modern imagination. He has died of natural causes, or by suicide, or in the wars of the century. It is astonishing how many American poets have lost their fathers at an early age. … Often the father is more than absent; he is lost, as he has been lost to himself for most of his adult life, crushed by his burdens, rendered impotent by fatigue and anxieties, reduced to a number, a statistical integer, in the army or the factory or the marketplace. The son goes in search of the father, to be reconciled in a healing embrace. In that act of love he restores his father's lost pride and manhood. Perhaps he also finds himself.

I agree with Kunitz that the absent father can serve as an inspiration for poetry and that poetry can act as a healing embrace between father and son. And I appreciate how earlier in the essay he offers an impressive list of women poets who have written about their fathers. Even so, as he points out, “The song of daughters is different from that of sons, and the scope of my essay does not permit me to add to its complications.” With this crucial distinction I also concur, because I regard The Family Romance of the Impostor-Poet Thomas Chatterton as a biography about masculine psychology as distinct from, though not, as I shall be explaining, dichotomous with, feminine psychology.

A few words concerning the reasoning that led to my original choice of the impostor as a representative of masculine conflicts are in order here. In the concluding section of my book on adolescence I contrast two rare emotional disorders that come to fruition during puberty, one of them prototypically feminine, the other prototypically masculine. The prototype for the feminine disorder, anorexia nervosa, is a typically adolescent, typically feminine solution to the dilemmas of becoming an adult. It entails the pursuit of a caricature of femininity—a pure and saintly attitude toward all forms of desire (not merely the avoidance of food); a nymphlike physical appearance devoid of body fat, hips, breasts, or any other grown-up feminine attribute. The moral and sexual life of the anorectic have been arrested at a childlike ideal of what it means to be female.

When it came to conceptualizing the male counterpart to anorexia, I was confronted with all the paradoxes inherent in contemporary research and thinking on issues of femininity and masculinity. Therefore I adopted a few strategies that I hoped would minimize the ideologies and intellectual shortcomings that usually result from these paradoxes.

The first of these was to avoid the statistical and normative solutions that have been promulgated by quite a number of feminist writers. Phyllis Chesler's influential notion, for example, that women internalize aggressive feelings while men externalize them was derived from a more or less numerical base: men are victimizers—killers, robbers, burglars, muggers—while women are victimized—they destroy themselves, succumbing to depression and hysteria. Women tend to become mental patients rather than criminals. Among psychotics, the men are the violent paranoids, the women the self-mutilating, silly hebephrenics. Men are sadists while women are masochists. This sort of head-counting approach to mental illness is often supplemented by the assumption that masculinity is synonymous with being strong and active while femininity is associated with being weak and passive.

I was wary of such dichotomizing of feminine and masculine traits. Such approaches to the gender dilemma also claim that one set of traits—feminine or masculine—is better than the other. While it is tempting to succumb to the appeal of the superiority of “the feminine approach to science,” “the feminine universe,” “feminine dialogue,” “feminine morality,” I am generally suspicious of the motives underlying any “better or worse” interpretation of the differences between the sexes. Often, I believe, when people dichotomize differences they regress to the very stereotypes they are so conscientiously striving to avoid.

I started with some basic numbers. Anorexia, a rare disorder in its full-fledged primary form to begin with, is rare in males, who comprise at most ten percent of all anorectics. The impostor, also a rare disorder in its primary form, is with few exceptions nonexistent among females. When I intentionally selected these apparently dichotomized disorders, I did not intend to demonstrate that females are more likely to solve gender dilemmas by manipulating their bodies while men are more likely to solve these dilemmas by manipulating others. I wanted to demonstrate how a seeming dichotomy, when explored from a psychoanalytic developmental perspective, reveals other more subtle dynamic issues. The anorectic and the impostor are distinctly different disorders but both are aftermaths of a developmental arrest in which an “absence of the father” usually exerts a significant influence.

When no one comes along to intrude on the intimacies of the mother-infant dialogue, the child's moral sense continues to be dominated by the concrete prohibitions and permissions of the nursery. The “voice of the father” (or any powerful third force that makes it clear to the child that his mother is not his possession) awakens the child to the complex moral authority of the larger social order. The father's presence in the mother's life and the mother's presence in the father's convey to the child the painful but necessary knowledge of the differences between the sexes and the generations. This bitter reminder that he is small, vulnerable, deficient in grown-up desires and capacities motivates a young child to become like his powerful parents and acquire some of their moral authority. Thus, in exchange for banishment by his parents, the child is permitted to participate in the principles of law and order that govern the social world in which he will grow up. The primitive nursery morality that gathers its dreadful power from the possibility of abandonment, absence, weaning, mutilation, and defilement is tamed and to a large extent replaced by inner conscience and the less awesome anxieties that arise from guilt. The primitive gender ideals of femininity and masculinity are also modified. As development proceeds, they become less stereotyped and rigid, more humane and rich with complexity.

The anorectic and the impostor represent alternative sex-gender scripts that never evolved beyond the simplified ideals of femininity and masculinity conveyed to a child during infancy. These infantile ideals, if unmodified and enriched by later development, will eventuate in pathological solutions to the dilemmas of arriving at genital maturity during adolescence. Neither the anorectic nor the impostor dares to risk the challenges of adult gender identity offered by the adolescent process. Though these pathological solutions are typically feminine and typically masculine, they cannot be construed as paired opposites with assigned valuations such as weak/strong, clean/dirty, good/bad, subjective/objective, passive/active. They are examples of what happens to a sex-gender script when the infantile gender ideal as conveyed by the mother during the earliest months and years of life does not confront the challenges posed later on by the three-person socialized version in which the father also plays a part. A weak articulation of the oedipal triangle—an “absence of the father”—leaves both boys and girls extremely vulnerable to unfocused, generalized anxieties about abandonment and mutilation. The anorectic and the impostor are prototypes of all who remain in the never-never land of moral and genital ambiguity because they are too frightened to assume the complex demands of adult moral responsibility and adult gender identity.

Thomas Chatterton, though he did suffer from a character perversion, was not a full-fledged impostor. He was a youth who struggled to find a way toward adult moral life and gender identity despite the absence of an actual father in his life. Because he was artistically gifted—a poet who could portray his quest for an adult ideal of manhood—he left a record of these struggles for all of us.

In conclusion I will relate an incident that occurred a few months before I completed this life of Chatterton, during a discussion period after I had presented a paper based on the life of Chatterton at a psychoanalytic conference. Since my paper dealt primarily with the borders between art and crime described earlier in this introduction, I requested that Judith Rossner be the official discussant rather than a psychoanalyst. Rossner recognized immediately that I was writing about the meaning of literary impostures and pathological lying, and in keeping with the spirit of the occasion, she decided to play a literary prank on the audience—the invention of a female literary impostor. Her invention was so convincing that many listeners thought they remembered reading Nell Shapiro's “A Servant's Diary,” a “lost” manuscript purportedly written by one Estella Martinez and then “discovered” by Nell.

Judith Rossner told the audience she wanted to stimulate discussion on an issue that concerned her:

The question that recurred as I read Louise's paper had to do not with its accuracy but with the limitations of her observations on Chatterton and on literary impostors in general. That is to say, all of her references, as well as those of Dr. Chasseguet-Smirgel, were to men, but they set me to thinking about women and imposture.

Rossner went on to point out that after all girls did have a head start on castration anxiety and that in any event

As a bored world becomes increasingly determined to erase those sexual distinctions that seem to have been crucial in arresting mankind's boredom, we shall doubtless see an increasing number of women supplying their missing pieces by faking advanced degrees … performing surgery they know almost as well as if they'd really gone to medical school … selling millions of gallons of corn oil stored in nonexistent storage tanks in New Jersey … and publishing manuscripts they've found in their grandmother's attics that are later revealed to have been written and placed there by themselves.

This was in fact the issue that dominated the discussion period, which dealt not only with the general problem of creativity and imposture but more specifically with the premise that women did have and were entitled to have the same perversions and character perversions as men. At first my male colleagues on the panel took a professional view and supported my thesis that the perversions and character perversions I had described were primarily male territories. Before too long, however, a few of them lost their analytic objectivity and began to react like ordinary besieged men. They began to blur the distinctions between technical language and everyday usage. One analyst, for example, found himself defending the commonplace notion that women were just as guilty of exhibitionism as men. Didn't they sit in front of the mirror all day, trying on clothes, putting on makeup, and so on? Strange alliances were made. Some feminist members of the audience supported this male analyst's argument by proposing that prostitutes and specialty call girls were as perverse as their male clients. Quite a few agreed that when it came to petty lies women were more accomplished than men. Equal rights had won the day.

Before presenting my paper I had discussed my premises with a few writers and psychoanalysts. One of them, William Grossman, predicted what might happen: “You'll see. The minute you begin to illustrate a few of the ways in which men and women are different you will get dozens of examples of how they are alike. Just listen. You will gather more fascinating and useful data than if you had set up months of interviews directly addressing the questions, ‘Do you know of women who engage in perverse sexual acts like exhibitionism, fetishism, voyeurism?’; ‘Do you have female patients who are practical jokers, impostors, or pathological liars?’” He was right.

That afternoon's discussion encouraged me to begin the research for my next book, which will examine female perversions and character perversions and their resemblances to or differences from male perversions and character perversions.

For now, I return to The Family Romance of the Impostor-Poet Thomas Chatterton, which is much less a sinister tale of sexual perversion than it is a study of the slender border between art and crime. I expect that some readers may question whether Thomas Chatterton's fate was in fact prototypically masculine. But I imagine even they will consent to my general thesis that, for Chatterton at least, an “absence of the father” stimulated his imposturous acts and also set him on his quest for poetic nobility. The first part of the Romance is about the healing embrace between Thomas Chatterton and Sir William Canynge, the fifteenth-century father through whom Chatterton hoped to find his own manhood. In the second part, we see what happened to Chatterton when he lost that father.

References

“The Impostor,” Adolescence, pp. 283-317.

Phyllis Greenacre, “The Impostor,” in Emotional Growth I; “The Family Romance of the Artist,” and “The Relation of the Impostor to the Artist,” in Emotional Growth II (New York: International Universities Press, 1971).

Thomas Mann. “it is in essence,” preface to Stories of Three Decades, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter (New York: Modern Library, 1936), p. vii; hereafter referred to as Mann.

The formula for the relationship between perversion and pathological lying appears in Otto Fenichel, “The Economics of Pseudologia Phantastica,” in Collected Papers of Otto Fenichel, 2nd ser. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1954), p. 133; hereafter referred to as Fenichel.

Jacob Arlow, “Character Perversion,” in Currents in Psychoanalysis, ed. Irwin M. Marcus (New York: International Universities Press, Inc., 1971), pp. 317-336; hereafter referred to as Arlow. “The petty lie is,” p. 326.

Literary Impostors in Eighteenth-Century England

Murray Warren, A Descriptive and Annotated Bibliography of Thomas Chatterton (New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1977), pp. 13-15. Warren presents a heavily abbreviated list of English literary impostors, among them Thomas Birch (1705-1766), who fabricated England's first newspaper, Englishe Mercurie, imprinted at London by Her Highness's Printer, 1588; Charles Betram (1723-1765), who produced an alleged ancient manuscript by Richard of Cirencester; John Jordon (1746-1809), the composer of some fraudulent tales on the life of Shakespeare; John Pinkerton (1758-1826), author of the spurious Select Scottish Ballads; and Allan Cunningham (1748-1842), who contributed many spurious entries to a collection of the Remains of Nithedale and Galloway Song.

Then, of course, there was Horace Walpole, the first person to detect the imposturous nature of Chatterton's poetry. He set an example for legitimate scholars by announcing on the title page that his own The Castle of Otranto was translated by a fictitious William Marshall, Gent. from the original Italian of Onuphrio Muralto, Canon of the Church of St. Nicholas, at Otranto, and claiming that the work, originally printed at Naples in 1529, was “found in the library of an ancient Catholic family in the north of England.”

Horace Walpole's literary imposture: Wilmarth Sheldon Lewis, Horace Walpole, Bollingen Series xxxv, 9 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1960), 157.

Stanley Kunitz, “The Poet's Quest for the Father,” New York Times Book Review, 22 February 1987, p. 37.

Judith Rossner, discussion on “Perversion, Falsehood, Creativity,” by Louise J. Kaplan, at conference on Character Perversions, Council of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapists, October 19, 1986.