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Mary Target presented her paper, “Some Thoughts on Lying and Pretending,” at the Scientific Meeting of the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis on March 14, 2011. Her paper focused on “self-preservative” lying and deceit, which serves the purpose of shoring up a vulnerable psychic organization. She identifies a “stable dissociation” at the core of lying, located between two states of mind, which she calls “pretend” and “psychic equivalent.” When “mind is part of the world” (equivalence), inner reality blends with outer experience. “Pretend” emerges as a more layered mental state, wherein thoughts and things may be separated and played with.
Lying emerges in the gap between “psychic equivalence” and “pretend.” On the one hand, lying may be utilized as a form of manipulation to cover over inner experiences of incoherence, dread, and despair. Conversely, lying may serve “benign and healthy” purposes: “pretend” allows for a space of illusion wherein new states of mind may develop and grow. Target argues that lying as a form of “pretend” must be respected by the analyst. The analytic frame is a space of safe “pretend,” such that “playing with reality” addresses precarious self-experience while nurturing new forms of thinking and self-integration.
The figures of the lie and pretense, of lying and pretending, emerge in Mary Target's paper as both familiars and foils. Indeed, her discussion clarifies the intimacy of the relation between deceit and imagination, revealed now as fixtures of our lives — mendacity and illusion variously emergent or retreating, yet always available to us, always intertwined. The paradox seems to hold true that it is when lying and pretending seem most remote from one another — in the pathological state that she describes as originating in or