Our Walter Mitty Syndrome

I think there’s a Walter Mitty in each of us.  We understand the most grotesque Thurberesque hallucinatory visions described creatively as a rather charming form of mental illness, because… well, because we know about this symptom… personally.  These illusions of grandeur reflect the loneliness of unacknowledged effort.  Walter is the creative, but disgraced and disinheirited half-brother of a beneficiary of Norman Vincent Peale’s power of positive thinking, a mere casualty of having minimized the side-effects of otherwise beneficial psychiatric treatment — a sickness nonetheless.