Novelist Saul Bellow Experienced His Deceased Friends as Aspects of Himself: Was this a Cognitive Ability Related to the Genesis of Characters?

I am continuing to read Bellow’s biography, which includes the following interesting statement:

“The deaths of contemporaries bring home the fact of one’s own mortality—in Bellow’s case, the process of mourning was intensified by his habit of experiencing his dead friends as aspects of himself” (1, p. 378).

Rather than apply the label introjective identification and leave it at that, I am wondering if this helps explain the genesis of a novelist’s characters.

Various novelists have said that characters in their novels may start as people they have known, but are not really copies of those people. Perhaps these other people serve as a stimulus for a personality-generator in the novelist’s mind, which produces a new personality to serve as a character.

New personalities that don’t serve as characters would be just “aspects of himself.”

1. James Atlas. Bellow: A Biography. New York, Random House, 2000.