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Deceit, along with its components of shame and identity diffusion, presents a complex dilemma for analysts who attempt to unearth their patients' psychic realities.
Confronted with distortion, they must ask themselves the reasons for their patients' dishonesty, the role it plays in their lives, and the influence it bears on various components of their minds, including ego and superego functioning, fantasies they desperately attempt to actualize, and unconscious tears. Perhaps most relevant to treating clinicians is why their patients go to such great lengths to hide their authenticities.
Presenting his paper, “Deceptively Simple or Simply Deceptive: Shame and Deceit,” Dr. Benjamin Kilborne endeavored to shed light on the nature of deceit and its derivatives. In his lecture, Dr. Kilborne indicated that patients fundamentally deceived in response to a world in which they felt alienated and unstable. Such patients not only experienced their reality as different from how it appeared, but also experienced their identities as detached and false. The result is distortion in the analytic hour. Dr. Kilborne stressed the central role shame had in distortion, that the experience of being unrecognizable facilitated deceit. This is especially true for children whose emotional experience has been ignored and who turn to deceit and invention to cope with trauma. Dr. Kilborne proposed that shame and deceit are interwoven into a vicious circle; shame leads to deceit, deceit produces an underlying sense of helplessness, which then produces more deceit and self-condemnation, which produces even more shame.
Dr. Kilborne emphasized the importance of disregarding truth or falsehood of the material, instead urging clinicians to freely follow the content and avoid judgments that may hinder them from understanding its meaning. Dr. Kilborne illustrated his ideas with the clinical case of an accomplished middle-aged married man involved in a two-year affair with his mistress.
According to Dr.