Samuel Clemens and Mark Twain: Pseudonym as Act of Reparation

Samuel Clemens's decision to adopt his best-known pseudonym, Mark Twain, is a fascinating story that has never been told from a psychoanalytic perspective. I speculate about unconscious factors that seem to play an important role in his choice. Although many of us remember that “Mark Twain” is riverboat jargon for a river depth of twelve feet, there is more to Clemens's story that is not so widely known and that suggests his choice of a pen name was multiply determined. The details of this story strongly suggest that taking the pen name Mark Twain was a compromise formation for Clemens, and one that included several impulses and defenses against them. In particular, I argue that it served as reparation to assuage the profound guilt he felt over the harm that he believed he had done to many people.

What do we know about the psychology of pseudonyms? As I set out to explore the psychoanalytic literature on this intriguing topic, I was surprised to learn that it is almost nonexistent. I touch on some general issues concerning this subject, as an introduction to a more intensive case study of Samuel Clemens's use of a pseudonym. We are now living in an unusual era when few books are published under pen names. This is a historical aberration that began in the early twentieth century. Nearly all medieval literature was anonymous. Anonymous and pseudonymous publication was the rule rather than the exception until the twentieth century. Since then the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction, so that we now have more plagiarism than anonymity,