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Walter Mitty Syndrome

Walter Mitty was a a fictional character in James Thurber's short story The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, published in 1941. Mitty was a meek, mild man with a vivid fantasy life: in a few dozen paragraphs he imagined himself a wartime pilot, an emergency-room surgeon, and a devil-may-care killer. He has become such a standard for the role that his name appears in several dictionaries. . . .

The Walter Mitty syndrome is clearly related: people use fantasy to escape from their normal lives. They believe that their lives are humdrum and boring, never realizing what an enormous gift it is to be alive at all. . . .

Nobody has yet added the syndrome to the canon of psychological lore, yet every clinician has seen cases, and the syndrome is sometimes used as a pejorative term, particualrly in the political arena.


[Walter Mitty did not have social networking and other Internet sites where it is easy to verify what comes out in print. ]