A Writers’ Guide to the Other in Fiction (A Psychological Perspective) by Carolyn Kaufman, Psy.D. owner - Archetype Writing: The Writers’ Guide to Psychology Characters with psychological problems and quirks have appeared as long as people have told stories. For most of recorded history, madness has been the work of angry gods and mischievous demons, and in many developing countries people still believe that psychological problems are caused by demonic possession, witchcraft, and vengeful gods. Though research has shown us that psychological disorders have more mundane causes like brain chemistry and stress, most of us are still subtly influenced by generations of superstition. We see people with mental illness as being extremely different from us, and sometimes even as deserving of their problems and the consequences of those problems. Otherness Alterity, or the concept of Other, is the inability to relate to someone or something we perceive as radically, insurmountably different from ourselves. Most of us have trouble knowing how to react to someone who behaves strangely, or whose behavior or ideas scare us. We say, “He’s out of his mind,”"He’s lost his mind,” or “He’s acting crazy.” Sometimes we even experience parts of ourselves as Other. We look back on choices we’ve made and try to make sense of them by saying things like “I wasn’t myself” or “I don’t know why I did it.” The Other appears in two common forms in fiction. In the first, the Other is a part of a character who can’t control her behavior, often because she’s possessed or mentally ill. In the second, the individual herself is Other, a villain so packed with evil Shadow characteristics that we can feel good about seeing her destroyed. The Other in Fiction The Other tends to be easy to pick out in fiction, because it usually has one or more of the following three qualities. 1. The Other is a Monster The villain who achieves Monster status has been imbued with so many Shadow qualities that he is no longer viewed as human, redeemable, or even worth saving. Killing him isn’t about killing another human being

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