Psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis was developed by Sigmund Freud around 1895, but it has since evolved into a diverse and internally complex combination of theoretical approaches, institutions, and clinical practices conducted in various parts of the world. Nonetheless, this diversity is unified by the common postulate of the unconscious. This hypothesis has profound implications for notions of lying and deception. Arguably the most sophisticated theorist on the topic of lying and deception is the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, whose ideas show how psychoanalysis institutes what is almost a reversal of traditional understandings of lying and deception.

Psychoanalysis in general offers a very different perspective from much of the mainstream psychology of lying. While the latter focuses on the conscious, intersubjective motivations behind deceptive but fundamentally social behavior, such as “white lies” and “face-saving” lies, psychoanalysis does not focus directly on the socialized intentions of the speaker at all. Instead, it locates truth—understood as cause in something like the medical, etiological sense—in a region actively excluded from consciousness by the forces of repression, namely the unconscious.

Thus, deception from a psychoanalytic perspective becomes primarily self-deception. Its bracketing out of the social aspects central to the psychology of lying allows psychoanalysis to isolate the ego, the seat of conscious selfhood, as a defense (a lie of sorts) against the truth of the unconscious, which in the Freudian tradition is fundamentally sexual.

When treated as an abstract social and perhaps even universal psychology, rather than as a clinical practice taking place only under certain conditions, this approach can reduce psychoanalysis to a violent, hermeneutic device that finds the “truth” of an Oedipal unconscious everywhere. Though cultural theorists in academia have found this a useful way to produce “psychoanalytic” readings of novels, paintings, and films, it has understandably invited criticisms from philosophers engaging with psychoanalysis on a primarily epistemological level.

However, the rich complexity that psychoanalysis has brought to debates about lying and deception can only be appreciated if it is rooted in clinical practice. It is from there that analysts from Sigmund Freud to Carl Jung, from Melanie Klein to Donald Winnicott, have considered the impact of lies and deception on transference (traditionally understood as positive and negative feelings directed toward the person of the analyst) and on therapeutic outcomes (again, traditionally understood on a medical model based on a reduction in pathological symptoms).