mythomania
Oliver Sacks, in his collection of neurological case studies 'The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat', recounts the story of a mythomaniacal patient. Like many of Sacks' cases, it reveals as much or more about 'normal' people as about the patient.
We have, each of us, a life-story, an inner narrative -- whose continuity, whose sense, is our lives. It might be said that each of us constructs and lives, a 'narrative', and that this narrative is us, our identities.
If we wish to know about a man, we ask 'what is his story -- his real, innermost story?' -- for each of us is a singular narrative, which is constructed, continually, unconsciously, by, through, and in us -- through our perceptions, our feelings, our thoughts, our actions; and, not least, our discourse, our spoken narrations. Biologically, physiologically, we are not so different from each other; historically, as narratives -- we are each of us unique.
To be ourselves we must have ourselves -- possess, if need be re-possess, our life-stories. We must 'recollect' ourselves, recollect the inner drama, the narrative, of ourselves. A man needs such a narrative, a continuous inner narrative, to maintain his identity, his self.
(...)
Deprived of continuity, of a quiet, continuous, inner narrative, [the patient] is driven to a sort of narrational frenzy -- hence his ceaseless tales, his confabulations, his mythomania. Unable to maintain a genuine inner world, he is driven to the proliferation of pseudo-narratives, in a pseudo-continuity, pseudo-worlds peopled by pseudo-people, phantoms.
(...)
For here is a man who, in some sense, is desperate, in a frenzy. The world keeps disappearing, losing meaning, vanishing -- and he must seek meaning, make meaning, in a desperate way, continually inventing, throwing bridges of meaning over abysses of meaninglessness, the chaos that yawns continually beneath him.