Psychoanalysis and Human Values

One of my patients has lately been concerned with what he has termed ‘living in falsehood’. What he sees and talks about is mostly things he has described and discussed previously in our work, but when he saw them within the frame of ‘living in falsehood’, they struck him like an earthquake. What he saw was not one or two particular lies, but how all his life has been imbued in falsehood. A recurring item has been the basis of his marriage. An early ‘chivalrous’ version tells how he came back from a long journey, and the girl he dated before his journey told him that she had been raped during his absence, and he offered to marry her in order to console her. In another version, the woman said that the rape was a lie and never happened. In still another narrative, his wife-to-be had been unfaithful during his absence and the talk about rape was a cover up. Still after several years of analysis it is not clear, either to me or to my analysand, what really happened between them. At a more basic level similar uncertainties obscure the conditions of his conception and birth. My patient doubts that he has been wished for — or rather feels that he has never been good enough as a substitute for a stillborn sibling. A long and painful delivery, including serious asphyxia, is one of the elements in the narratives of my patient's coming to the world. In my countertransference I have experienced my patient as a fertilized egg which has not been able to decide whether to attach to my analytic uterus or not. Thus the life of my patient has unfolded within a misty uncertainty allowing a plurality of simultaneous vague stories.

My patient's ‘discovery’ of his living in falsehood has the quality of what Bion named an ‘act of faith’1 (1). Through a leap into the dark my patient leaves at a side his preoccupation with the various versions of his stories supported by fragments of memory and desire. He is becoming aware of something more fundamental. He suddenly sees how he has attempted