Lying shields us from our vulnerability to our own unconscious desires, but also corrodes a shared reality. The liar wields the power to create their own reality free of uncertainty, writes Josh Cohen. 

Why do we lie? In one key respect, the psychoanalytic response to this venerable (and currently very urgent) question is broadly in line with other psychologies: we lie to evade the many and various unpleasant consequences of telling the truth. Lying to others can preserve us from the embarrassment of having values, tastes or desires that offend societal norms; lying to ourselves helps protect our favourable self-image. Beyond these defensive functions, lying can confer advantages over public and personal rivals and adversaries, in sex or business, art or politics.

But by placing conflict at the centre of our inner lives, psychoanalysis also enriches and complicates our understanding of lying. Freud proposed that our minds are a permanent battleground between the id, a reservoir of unbound and excessive desires both sexual and destructive, and the ego, the mental agency tasked with the recognising and navigating the claims of external reality.

We are shifted from a simplistic psychology of unconscious instinct against conscious reason, to a vision of the psyche as originally and irremediably ambivalent about its own desires.

Psychoanalysis is thus often seen as the inheritor of a psychology, familiar from the monotheistic religions as well as Romantic thought, in which instinct wages war with reason. But what complicates this Manichean vision is that Freud refuses a simplistic alignment of the unconscious with the primitive ‘truth’ of the human mind, and the conscious with its ‘false’ social veneer. A part of the ego, specifically the mechanism of repression, is in fact unconscious.