Fernando Pessoa

Portuguese writer with almost 80 heteronyms.

Self created Multiple personality because he let the existence of conflicting sides emerge in an organic way, from the undefined realm of betweenness. He did not control the creation and existence of his heteronyms. He let them be, simultaneously.

Self control is not an absolute good, nor is chaos just disarray and confusion. At the heart of the urge to control lies a vision of perfection. Perfection is ultimate loneliness, disturbed by nothing.

Interactive arrangement of multiple creative personalities generated spontaneously in the chaotic domain of the psyche, in response to the limitations of his self-imposed monadic existence.


* Has different heteronyms; some used to think, some used to feel.

* "One writes to become other than what one is". (Guilty of making up alter-egos to compensate for a life deliberately unlived?)

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Despite these, Pessoa possessed a common sense of consistency of thought and plausibility of character. Unlike ordinary people, he did not reject whatever occurred to him in contradiction with his prevailing vision of himself. -- What exactly is the idea of a self?

Artistic value: instead of unconsciously reducing his consciousness in order to make it cohesive, he reordered it to create room for different kinds of minds and talents within it. Pessoa did not lose his identity - he developed multiple identities.

He created rules put together by heteronym, one of which stated by Bernardo Soares (of the book of disquiet): "Enlarge your personality without including anything from the outside - asking nothing from other people and imposing nothing on other people, but being other people when you have need of others" -- why is he so adamant on being independent though? He was previously hurt?

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Nobodiness: Writers' nobodiness, manifested as a contradictory, fluid or missing self is not limited to the duration of writing. "I am no more than a secretary of the invisible world"

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 Pessoa experienced a state close to his idea of madness, not madness.

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Two way collaborations of concepts of self may lead to a more fully developed account of the self.  The two concepts:

1) "minimal self" - a self devoid of temporal extension. Clarified by drawing a distinction between the sense of self agency, and sense of self-ownership for actions. (In schizophrenia, sense of self-agency may be disrupted).

Sense of self agency: the sense that you are the initiator or source of action.

Sense of self-ownership: the sense that it is your body that is moving.


2) "narrative self" - involves personal identity and continuity across time. Necessary condition for the non-fictional aspects of a narrative self is the proper working of the episodic memory. One's own self narrative is always entangled in the narrative of others.

An individual self consists of the abstract and movable point where the various stories (of fiction or biography) that the individual tells about himself, or are told about him, meet up.

Language has played a role in developing our own self-concept.

David Hume: self consists of a bundle of momentary impressions that are strung together by the imagination.