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The Many Faces of Deceit is a well written, well documented, and valuable book. It also is a “good read.” For example, the book opens with the following anecdote:
It was a rainy day, the kind that made the analyst feel fortunate that she had a home office. Her first patient, a young woman in her twenties, was late, and the analyst, while waiting, looked out of her window at the street. A taxi arrived at the front door of the apartment building. She saw her patient get out of the taxi, rather regally allowing the doorman to escort her into the building, sheltering her with an umbrella. Two minutes later, she arrived at the analyst's door. She apologized to the analyst for being late. She could not find a taxi—all were taken—and she had to walk twenty blocks to her session in the pouring rain.(p. 3)
Although deception is to some degree ubiquitous in everyday life, the authors note that psychoanalysts have not studied deceptive phenomena systematically or comprehensively. The book is largely concerned with the varieties of deception practiced by patients on their analysts during their treatment. It also deals with deception in the arts as seen in clinical analyses, studies of imposture in the noted artist Arshile Gorky, and the character of M. Butterfly in the play of that name. The central position of the authors is that deception in all its forms is not simply an individual matter but a dyadic, interactive process that requires a deceiver along