In psychology, mythomania, also known as pathological lying, is a condition involving compulsive lying. The affected person might believe their lies to be truth, and may have to create elaborate myths to reconcile them with other facts.
Dale Archer declared, " Pathological liar is absolutely the toughest individual to deal with as a psychiatrist. Because you can't take anything they say at face value. And you can't, you know, fill in their personality. You don't know what's real and what's not."
Frantz Fanon said, "Sometimes people hold a core belief that is very strong. When they are presented with evidence that works against that belief, the new evidence cannot be accepted. It would create a feeling that is extremely uncomfortable, called cognitive dissonance. And because it is so important to protect the core belief, they will rationalize, ignore and even deny anything that doesn't fit in with the core belief."
Well :) For example, when people smoke (behavior) and they know that smoking causes cancer (cognition), they are in a state of cognitive dissonance.
William Shakespeare said in Sonnet 53:
What is your substance, whereof are you made,
That millions of strange shadows on you tend?
The mythomanias remain unexplored because they look so normal. The other reason, perhaps :) is that they are chameleons made of Shakespeare's "millions of strange shadows," and are described by "dipping a pen into a dozen different inkpots."
Johnson outlines a range of factors and conditions that make episodic memories bind to or dissociate from their origin. She views cognitive processes underlying learning and memory within a complex frame work; a multiple-entry, modular memory system.
Everybody knows all too well that human beings are imperfect and fallible. Therefore, mythomania is another form of deception and self-deception. Indeed, all problems have fuzzy, rather than hard, boundaries.
Self-deception happens when the brain collects and updates information to create and shape within itself representations of the outside world.
A lie is changing the truth deliberately to reach an objective. Mythomania, known as lying pathologically, is an individual lying about almost anything in various environments and believing in these lies himself.
Shakespeare said fiction is full of lies. Fiction is lies. Fiction is full of liars too.
Mythomania comes from two ancient roots; the Greek mythos (meaning "myth") and the Late Latin mania (meaning "insanity" marked by uncontrolled emotion or excitement).
Ernest Dupré, the French psychiatrist, was the first to introduce mythomania as a medical term.
Then, :) what if someone you know lies for a good reason? The mythomaniac convinces himself or herself that he or she has insights into others. Many politicians fumble with pathetic fallacies to score political points by attacking other people.
Because as all good politicians know, there are facts, and there are alternative facts. And some people said: there are not alternative facts, just truth and lies.
Fake news and alternative facts challenge the notion of truth. Those spreading them undermine the functioning of democratic states.
Today, lie, insincerity, delusion, mythomania, and fabulation all converge in the same direction: manipulation.
Speech manipulation has become commonplace in our society. We have placed the speech at the centre of public life and mythomaniacs are the best speakers; they have so many techniques designed to help them to make us believe that their alternative facts are truths.
From the Queen to the Kardashians, via Banksy, Nando's, vaping, the vogue of the cronut, the mushroom-like rise of Dubai,..., etc...
Many people create their very own mythical story.
As long as there is death, there will be myth.
Have a great Tuesday!
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