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In her 2005 article ‘The many faces of lying’, Alessandra Lemma attempts to broaden our understanding of what may motivate—consciously or unconsciously—a patient to lie, applying these reflections to three case studies. I found the interpretation, ‘Lies are perhaps like a skin for you that keep you warm and safe in a world where you feel you can't trust anyone’ (2005, p. 741) as the likely foundation of this article. Lemma mainly uses Glasser's (1979) binary notion of self-preservative lying versus sadistic lying and also reflects on lies as creating a skin, camouflage, or deception between Self and Other. Drawing upon Darwin's notion about evolution that species have often been preserved through using deception, she considers the positive use of lies and how the psyche may falsify truth in response to unbearable feelings of betrayal, deception, abandonment, and separation. In this sense, lies can hold a healing compensatory function. If, however, lies are autonomous and unconscious, they can become destructive and sadistic.