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President Clinton should have considered hiring John Forrester to defend him in the impeachment hearings held by Congress for his allegedly having lied about a sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky. For in the first and more readable essay of the two that make up his book Truth Games: Lies, Money, and Psychoanalysis, Forrester mounts an exuberant and provocative defense of lying.
Lying, he argues, is not only ubiquitous, inescapable, functional, and often necessary, but often a virtue as well. He speaks of the “fundamental paternalism (or is it maternalism?) of the liar” (p. 21), while finding cruelty and hostility in the truthteller: “much is destroyed and sacrificed in the name of truth” (p. 109). He suggests that we should interest ourselves in the “psychopathology of the truthteller” rather than in the presumed psychopathology of the liar—a sentiment that the many who think we should investigate Kenneth Starr rather than President Clinton might agree with.
Lying, Forrester argues, characterizes man to the extent that we could speak of “man the liar.” The first liar was also the first poet, the first creative individual. Forrester's defense of lying is in the Nietzschean tradition, and is aimed against the “absolutist moral condemnation of lying” that philosophers such as Augustine and Kant, whom he calls the “hardliners of truth telling,” have demanded. This stance is fruitful in that it leads him to imaginatively explore the affinities between lying and fantasy, play and fiction, which allows him to illuminate the complicated issues of truth and fiction in psychoanalysis.
Forrester's validation of lying—like Nietzsche's and Oscar Wilde's—is purposefully provocative, meant to tease us into thought. But he loads the dice by focusing only on creative, kind, and helpful deceptions, glossing over pernicious ones. Following Freud, he celebrates the child's lying to a parent as a positive force in the formation of the individual self, a “willed autonomy” offering pr