Chapter 6: Fernando Pessoa
“I was studying Psychology at Leningrad State University,” Psycho began. “I finished my post-graduate studies that year but I didn’t submit a dissertation. And all because of a Portuguese psychologist who had written a thesis about different personalities co-existing in one person. He had come to the USSR in search of some the material he still needed. He believed all of us there suffered from split personalities.”
“We’ve got three. We’re split three-ways,” I put in. “As the joke says: Soviet people think one thing, say another, and do something else again.”
“Precisely. This Portuguese psychologist was writing a dissertation on the psychological state of people in totalitarian states, like Portugal in Pessoa’s lifetime. He had learnt Russian specially and come
