These were literary personas and treated as such by the author himself, not to be confused with dissociative disorders, where the self loses track of which persona he really is.
Hi pencilcode, here's the passages that led me to my conclusions:
From Pessoa himself: "They are beings with a sort-of-life-of-their-own, with feelings I do not have, and opinions I do not accept. While their writings are not mine, they do also happen to be mine.”
"...heteronyms, a term he eventually chose over pseudonym because it more accurately described their stylistic and intellectual independence from him, their creator, and from each other—for he gave them all complex biographies and they all had their own distinctive styles and philosophies. They sometimes interacted, even criticizing or translating each other’s work. Some of Pessoa’s fictitious writers were mere sketches, some wrote in English and French, but his three main poetic heteronyms—Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, Álvaro de Campos—wrote only in Portuguese, and each produced a very solid body of work."
The first is not only depersonalization, but someone who has come to grips and comfort with his symptoms of depersonalization. This takes a lot of time for many people with DID to accept as a symptom, as holding but accepting strongly opposed inner conflicts is quite a difficult skill that many dissociative personality systems both have to acquire and struggle with.
The second yields consistently in personas, these passages both have the consistent "fingerprint" of someone with DID, from my experiences both in the literature and in interacting with people that are DID/OSDD systems.
It is like talking to an experienced software engineer vs a novice out of college eager to prove his own worth and head knowledge. There is a subtle (or sometimes not so subtle), but obvious difference, and there is a set, or a particular "flavor" of tells that shows someone is an incredibly experienced engineer vs someone who is not. However, explicitly quantifying those tells is a difficult task, so my apologies if I don't do so as clearly here as I might hope to do.
Were it not for the first quote, I might think it would be something like Mark Twain, where it's a little more clearly just a literary act for some reason or another. However, I suppose it is wise to apply some level of skepticism or otherwise to backdiagnosing anything, as with anything. We can only presume beyond a certain point, I believe.
From Pessoa himself: "They are beings with a sort-of-life-of-their-own, with feelings I do not have, and opinions I do not accept. While their writings are not mine, they do also happen to be mine.”
"...heteronyms, a term he eventually chose over pseudonym because it more accurately described their stylistic and intellectual independence from him, their creator, and from each other—for he gave them all complex biographies and they all had their own distinctive styles and philosophies. They sometimes interacted, even criticizing or translating each other’s work. Some of Pessoa’s fictitious writers were mere sketches, some wrote in English and French, but his three main poetic heteronyms—Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, Álvaro de Campos—wrote only in Portuguese, and each produced a very solid body of work."
The first is not only depersonalization, but someone who has come to grips and comfort with his symptoms of depersonalization. This takes a lot of time for many people with DID to accept as a symptom, as holding but accepting strongly opposed inner conflicts is quite a difficult skill that many dissociative personality systems both have to acquire and struggle with.
The second yields consistently in personas, these passages both have the consistent "fingerprint" of someone with DID, from my experiences both in the literature and in interacting with people that are DID/OSDD systems.
It is like talking to an experienced software engineer vs a novice out of college eager to prove his own worth and head knowledge. There is a subtle (or sometimes not so subtle), but obvious difference, and there is a set, or a particular "flavor" of tells that shows someone is an incredibly experienced engineer vs someone who is not. However, explicitly quantifying those tells is a difficult task, so my apologies if I don't do so as clearly here as I might hope to do.
Were it not for the first quote, I might think it would be something like Mark Twain, where it's a little more clearly just a literary act for some reason or another. However, I suppose it is wise to apply some level of skepticism or otherwise to backdiagnosing anything, as with anything. We can only presume beyond a certain point, I believe.