Everyone says that “the truth hurts,” but only the liar does something about it. Pathological or compulsive lying is an interesting human behavior, and can up to a point be quite spellbinding. In psychiatry it is customary to distinguish between lying that serves a clear “external” benefit, and “pathological,” habitual lying that is not meant primarily to gain any external benefit, but meets psychological needs. Although the first type of lying can reach horrifying dimensions, in essence it is no different from the lying that most mortals engage in from time to time in order to bypass problems in their environment and to achieve certain realistic objectives in their lives.
In order to understand the second type of lying it is necessary to descend to the depths of mental life and to ask: What are those “emotional needs” that cause a liar to distort reality and turn attacks against truth into an ideal, and occasionally into an actual lifestyle? From a psychological-dynamic point of view human beings perceive reality, experience it, and try to influence it, not only according to conscious wishes and emotional needs, but according to deep-seated fantasies and anxieties that are beyond the reach of consciousness.
This point of view, which is at the basis of psychoanalytic thinking and healing, will affect the way in which we understand, for example, a person who fraudulently introduces himself as a financial genius, a war hero or a victim of sexual abuse, and thereby arouses the admiration or compassion of those around him, or even wins financial reward. Although this liar is liable under certain circumstances to admit that he distorts reality, even after he is confronted with his lies he will almost certainly point to rational or utilitarian motives.
The compulsive or pathological liar is usually unaware that his lying, whether or not it is “worthwhile” for him in a material or social sense, serves him as a type of revenge and as a strategy with which he tries to stabilize his self-identity, to fulfill infantile wishes, to ward off fears of psychic disintegration, or to deny his need of the other.
The debate as to whether pathological lying (pseudologia fatastica ) is a willful act or is accompanied by impaired reality testing, has yet to be decided. But there is no question that among pathological liars there are very talented people who fill important positions and sensitive roles.
Within every falsehood, as in every psychotic delusion, hides a core of psychic truth of which the person is unaware. “Children’s lies,” whose dream-like nature and psychological significance were first understood by Sigmund Freud some 100 years ago, enable a glance at the tremendous power of unconscious psychic reality over our conscious grasp of external reality. For the most part these are playful and creative lies, which may bend the truth but do not attack it; lies that like a good joke enable the listener to let go of his hold on the world of logic and meaning for a while and devote himself to a dream world where everything is possible.
“Children’s lies” are an important milestone in the developmental journey, during which a youngster learns to distinguish between his own inner world and that of others, between his private emotional reality and the reality he shares with others. The lie helps the child to make the boundary between the world of reality and the world of imagination more flexible, but at the same time it signals his existence as an entity separate from others. So children lie not only in order to express their wishes, or to avoid punishment, but in order to strengthen their fragile sense of sovereignty over their world, to explore the inner world of those around them, and to calm the anxiety that their inner world is transparent to adult eyes.
Lying, like self-deception, can be understood as a result of early emotional deprivation, as an expression of an inner conflict that prevents a person from accepting certain parts of his personality that he sees as intolerable, or as an attempt to master an emotional upheaval by attacking his inner reality in addition to the inner world of others.
We should also distinguish between neurotic lying, which stems from the need to conceal the painful truth, and perverse lying, whose goal is to “attack” the truth, and to enjoy debasing human psychological needs and universal values. The second type of lying is the hardest to treat because those who suffer from it may have an uncanny ability to fabricate things with the “help” of the truth.
Whether we prefer to focus on the external reality and see insincerity as a response to an intolerable encounter with frustrations and humiliation, or whether we see lying as a particular way in which parts of the psyche are attacking the inner reality and the experience of needs, including the human need for the truth – we cannot help accepting the conclusion reached by the bird in T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets”: “Human kind cannot bear very much reality.”