VIII. Facts and Fictions1

All of psychopathology could be said to be the consequence of self-deception, but the detailed study of the mechanics of defensive operations is probably more correctly described, as Money-Kyrle has done, as enquiries into the sources of misconceptions. These conceptual errors can readily be seen to differ from, say, perceptual errors resulting from such pathological states of mind as projective identification - the “delusions of clarity of insight” (Meltzer) or hallucinosis (Bion). The term ‘self-deception’ seems too valuable to allow it a vague and popular general meaning. We would probably like to reserve it for situations in which we can define, from the evidence, the intention of self-deception. Freud clearly thought that this played a part in the operation of repression, with its consequence of amnesias covered by paramnesias, but the hydrostatic aspects of the Libido theory required that the amnesia be a consequence of a mechanism called into play automatically by the economics of mental pain. Only the filling of the gap by the paramnesia could be taken as intentional, and he compared it with the ‘Bowdlerising’ of theological texts.

One must accept that it is a great mystery how it is that a person can deceive himself. If it involves matters of judgment it is comprehensible; if it involves distortions of perception, or of memory for significant sequence, one can understand it. But when the facts themselves seem to have been replaced by confabulation, it is difficult to understand how it can command the author's credence. It is not a rare occurrence by any means, in fact the more one becomes alert to its manifestations in others the more one begins to see it operate in oneself. Usually this is at a social level where fidelity to the facts may be of little importance compared with acquiescence in the social ritual. For instance, to entertain one's guests a story is embroidered, distorted, exaggerated, etc., but of course it does not particularly command belief.