The term fabulist has been getting an airing recently, partly because of the intense scrutiny surrounding the late Cambridge academic Jason Arday. Questions were raised about parts of his academic work and biography. Arday disputed many of the allegations and strongly rejected being portrayed as a liar or fantasist. I have no idea what was going on. Diagnosing people from newspaper reports is bad psychiatry and worse manners.
But it did make me wonder: what exactly is a fabulist?
It’s a fabulous word. Originally, and still today, a fabulist can simply mean someone who writes fables. Aesop was a fabulist. Somewhere along the way it also acquired its less flattering meaning: someone who creates elaborate stories and presents them as true.
For my purposes, there’s a useful distinction between the fabulist and the ordinary fantasist.
I should declare an interest here. I love fantasy. I have imagined books becoming wildly successful, speeches receiving standing ovations and, yes, I have rehearsed my Nobel Prize acceptance speech. In considerable detail. So far, Stockholm has shown little interest.
This is normal. A fantasist may spend hours in imagined worlds while knowing perfectly well they are imagined. Everyone does it; most people simply don't confess to the Nobel speech (imagine a world without embellishment – LinkedIn would go broke). Fabulism begins when you recruit other people into those worlds.
There is probably a continuum:
- Daydream: Imagine if I were a famous surgeon.
- Embellishment: I nearly went to medical school.
- Lie: I studied medicine.
- Fabulism: an entire biography gradually appears involving medical school, heroic operations, famous colleagues, awards and perhaps the patient whose life you once saved.
When the fantasy gets an audience
Years ago at university, I knew someone who seemed to do something like this. He was bright, personable and a high achiever. Yet he crafted an elaborate biography around himself: an elite education, prestigious awards, and impressive humanitarian work overseas. None of it seemed necessary. The real person was impressive enough.
The stories were also surprisingly easy to check. Eventually they unravelled. He didn’t mount a grand defence. He simply shrank away and joined a different friendship group.
I have no idea what was going on psychologically. At the time I thought psych was something you did if you couldn’t get into paediatrics. What stuck with me was a much more interesting question: why invent a more impressive version of yourself when the real version is already pretty good?
Psychiatry has an extravagant term for the extreme version: pseudologia fantastica, sometimes called pathological lying or mythomania. It has been described for more than a century but isn’t a formal DSM diagnosis. Remarkably, a recent systematic review identified only 55 well-described cases across more than a hundred years of psychiatric literature.
The stories can become elaborate, repeated and woven into identity. Illness, education, jobs, achievements and remarkable life events are common themes.
The ordinary liar changes a fact. The fabulist may change the character they are playing in their own life.
The tangled web
Why would anyone do it?
Sometimes there is an obvious reward: money, status or avoiding punishment. That is closer to fraud or malingering. Sometimes invented illness is part of factitious disorder, what many people still know as Munchausen syndrome. Personality problems, particularly narcissistic, histrionic, borderline and antisocial traits, also appear in the literature.
Other false stories aren’t really lies at all. Someone in mania or psychosis may make extraordinary claims because they genuinely believe them. People with neurological or memory disorders can confabulate, unconsciously filling gaps in memory.
More interesting is when there’s no obvious payoff. Perhaps the reward is admiration, sympathy, belonging, escape from shame, or simply getting to be a more impressive version of yourself.
And perhaps it doesn’t start with an entire imaginary life.
Maybe you tell a small lie and people are impressed. That feels good, so you add another. The next story draws even more admiration. Soon the rewards reinforce the behaviour, while every new invention has to remain consistent with everything that came before.
Sir Walter Scott had it right: “Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practise to deceive.”
A few successful embellishments become stories. The stories require more stories. Eventually the whole construction becomes horribly difficult to maintain.
At some point, you are no longer maintaining a lie. You are maintaining a person.
Perhaps that helps explain why fabulists rarely arrive in psychiatric clinics saying, “Doctor, I keep inventing my biography.” Clinicians encounter pathological lying, but it is usually attached to something else: a damaged relationship, a workplace disaster, legal trouble or another psychiatric problem.
Which brings me back to my university acquaintance.
What strikes me now is that the fabulism didn’t seem to continue forever. As far as I could tell, the elaborate inventions gradually faded away. He went on to have an excellent career and became, by any reasonable measure, genuinely successful.
Perhaps the lies became harder to maintain, or perhaps they became unnecessary. I prefer the second explanation, though I have no evidence for it whatsoever.
There is something appealing about that possibility. A fabulist may begin by inventing the person they wish they were. But if the real person eventually acquires some of what the invented person had, the fiction may lose its purpose.
I wonder how many successful people are ex-fabulists, masters of the fake-it-till-you-make-it genre?
My old acquaintance had once invented a more impressive version of himself. In the end, he may simply have become one.