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“… Finally, never forget that you have promised absolute honesty, and never leave anything unsaid because for any reason it is unpleasant to say it.” Freud1
Moved by a clinical experience I recently had, I decided to review the psychiatric literature on lying in psychoanalytic therapy. Unfortunately, I found not a single paper that has this subject as its central theme. Yet, it would appear that lying in therapy is not only worthy but compelling of sound study.
Various aspects of lying have been more generously treated, however, e.g., lying in children, the delinquent aspects of lying and its detection, and the psychopathology of lying. Regarding the last named, different forms of deception are found in clinical entities namely: the Korsakoff syndrome, the hysterical persinality, the psychopathic charecter, the Ganser syndrome, pseudologia fantastica, the pathological liar, mythomania, the Munchausen syndrome, the “as if” reaction, etc., etc.
Lying in itself is not a symptom of mental disorder, nor necessarily a negative attribute. In younger children, for instance, what may appear to be a severe pathologic lie is nothing more than a fantasy which may be considered a healthy form of imagination. There are also the so called “normal lying,” or the “little white lies,” fabrications created to spare another person's feelings.
Wile2 considers lying a biological need, the protective devices existent among animals — the leaf butterfly, the color changes of the chamaleon, the playing dead of the opposum, etc. — are facts supporting his assumption. The same author and other writers like Green3 have indicated the social significance of the lie and the crucial role that duplicity plays in our society. Selling4 in his “Psychiatric Aspects of the Pathological Liar” states that if all liars were removed from civilization our inhabitated lands would be deserts.
Even mythology tells us of Mercury, the son of Jupiter and Maia, messenger of the Gods, who wore winged shoes and