Faith Consolo and "The False Self"

Julie Satow has written a riveting exposé of Faith Hope Consolo who was a glamorous figure in the late 20th-century world of New York City real estate. (Full disclosure: Julie Satow is my niece.)

Ms. Consolo told the world she was born into the real estate business, benefiting from her father’s legacy as a real estate executive. She claimed that her mother was a child psychiatrist and that she had gone to Miss Porter’s School for Girls and had a degree from Parsons Paris. But after Julie Satow wrote Consolo’s obituary in December 2018, she discovered an entirely different story.

Consolo lived with her mother and grandmother in a small house just off Coney Island Avenue in Brooklyn. Ms. Consolo's mother was not a child psychiatrist, but a hairdresser at a department store. Her mother had a heart ailment and died when she was 12. She was left to be raised by her grandmother. As for Faith’s father, Julie Satow learned that Frank Consolo was not a real estate executive, but a career criminal who did stints in Alcatraz and at the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas.

Consolo is an extreme example of D.W. Winnicott’s concept of the “False Self.” Winnicott says that in health, our public self is a False Self. All the polite and mannered social behaviors we display hide and protect the True Self which is known to close friends and family. In a more extreme form, the False Self defends against the True Self which may not be fully known by anyone else. The purpose is to preserve the individual in spite of abnormal environmental conditions. But in its most pathological form, the False Self is set up as real and everyone thinks that it is the real self. In friendships and work relationships, observers think the false self is the real person. In the psychotic version, the actor cannot distinguish between the false and real self.

There are many famous versions of the False Self which are commonly called “imposters.” Convicted murderer Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter arrived in the United States from Germany as a teen and by the early 1980s was living in San Marino, California. There, he rented a house, called himself Christopher Mountbatten. He told people he was a movie producer and relative of British statesman Lord Mountbatten. By the early 1990s, he was going by Clark Rockefeller and residing in New York City, where he dined at private clubs, had an impressive (but fake) art collection and dropped the names of famous people who were supposedly his friends.

Ferdinand Demara, another famous imposter, became the subject of a book and a movie both titled “The Great Impostor.” He made a career out of posing as other people, even working as a surgeon despite never attending medical school. During the Korean War, Demara pulled off his boldest hoax after stealing the credentials of a doctor he knew and masquerading as a surgeon with the Royal Canadian Navy. Working aboard a destroyer, Demara performed a number of surgical procedures, including the extraction of a bullet lodged near a soldier’s heart. Like Consolo, it was Demara’s success that brought the media attention that led to him being exposed as a fraud.

In the cases of Gerhartsreiter, Demara, and Consolo, it was their grandiosity that led to their downfalls. In the first two cases they lived to experience their demise, while in Colsolo’s case, it was her obituary that led to the unmasking of her False Self.