The Lie: A High Risk Signal

Healthy mental growth seems to depend on truth as the living organism dependson food. If it is lacking or deficient, the personality deteriorates.

Squawking to ask for food is a survival strategy built into the instinctual behaviour of many species, including humans. However, squawking in a situation where attracting attention can carry the danger of being killed does not seem to be a behaviour beneficial to survival. And yet a recent article in Nature relates how a species of small bird (Turdoides bicolor) living in a desert region of South Africa has developed a highly effective technique for compelling their parents to provide them with more food (Thompson et al., 2013).

Flying in open grassland, that is, in an area where they are most exposed to predators, the young of this species start to call, precisely because they are putting themselves at risk of death by doing this, they compel their parents to give them an additional quantity of food.

As the researchers have observed, there is also a kind of lie present in this form of blackmail: the young birds simulate a highly intense need for the sole purpose of obtaining more food than they would normally have had.

These little birds are like human adolescents who sometimes use dangerous situations or make excessive use of lying to attract the attention of their parents.

Adolescents tell lies to compensate for their sense of inferiority (Mazzoncini, 2010), to avenge themselves against the disappointing love object (Billow, 2004), and to identify with a lying object (O'Shaughnessy, 1990).

So adolescents in analysis frequently use lies as protection for the Self with the aim of making it more attractive and lovable, and they need to feel that the analyst believes their truth and sees them as they want to be seen.

What mental stance should the analyst adopt, and what tools does he/she have in this undertaking? Faced with a lying patient, the analyst finds herself faced at