Compulsive liar psychoanalyzed: a real case

Psychologist Stephen Grosz relates his experience with a compulsive liar.

Compulsive liar and Psychoanalysis: a real case

In this article I am going to tell the story (1), the analysis and the results reached by the American psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz with one of his patients. This patient was referred by his family doctor for being a pathological compulsive liar, in order to see if Grosz could offer him the therapy he needed to stop lying.

A history of lying: compulsive liar

The doctor sent Philip (2) to visit Dr. S. Grosz after he happened to run into his wife and she tearfully asked if they could please talk about possible options they had for treating her husband's lung cancer. As the doctor told her, Philip was in fact completely healthyHe had apparently invented this lie in order to tell it to his wife.

In addition to this fact, during the first session, Philip confessed other of his innumerable lies to Grosz himself:

• He had told his father-in-law, who was a sports journalist, that he had once he had been selected as an alternate for the English archery team..

• At a school fundraising party, At a school fundraising party, he told his daughter's music teacher that he himself was the son of a famous composer, who was also gay and single.who was also gay and unmarried.

• He also recounted that the first lie he remembered telling was one he told a classmate when he was 11 or 12 years old, telling him that he had been recruited by MI5 to be trained as an agent..

Lies too risky?

If there was one thing the psychoanalyst soon realized, it was that his patient didn't seem to care that his "vic didn't seem to care that his "victims" knew he was lying.. In fact, as Grosz rightly recounts, when she asked him if he minded if they thought he was a liar:

"He shrugged his shoulders."

And he added that the people he lied to seldom challenged him.. In fact, his wife merely accepted her husband's miraculous recovery; or in the case of his father-in-law, who simply remained silent.

On the other hand, when asked about the impact of his lies on his work environment, he argued that in his work environment, "everybody lies.everybody lies"(he is a television producer).

Lying to the therapist

From the very beginning, Grosz was well aware of the possibility that his patient was lying to him as well, and this happened a month later.and this happened a month into therapy. He stopped paying.

It took him five months to pay, and up to the time he paid the fee, he told lies of all kinds, he told lies of all kindsfrom the fact that he had lost his checkbook to the fact that he had donated his money to the Freud House Museum.

The moment when he finally paid, was, on the one hand, a relief and, on the other hand, a worry, on the one hand, a relief, and on the other, a worry.. At that moment he realized that he had been telling her bigger and bigger lies to avoid paying, but more importantly, he began to understand why he was lying.

Why do you lie pathologically?

As she analyzed the situation she had experienced, she realized that as Philip lied to her more and more he was becoming more and more withdrawn, more and more secretive..

It was then that he realized that Philip might be taking advantage of the social convention that we keep silent when someone lies to us. But that wouldn't explain why he needs to get that control over the situation and provoke such silences..

This point was the focus of therapy for the next year.

The root of the problem

Naturally, they talked about their childhood and their family. There appeared to be no remarkable data that seemed to explain the reason for his pathology. Until one day, Philip recounted a seemingly insignificant event that turned out to be momentous..

Since the age of three, he had been sharing a room with his twin brothers. Sometimes he would wake up in the middle of the night because of the noise of the customers coming out of a pub across the street from his house. When this happened, he sometimes felt the urge to urinate, but he would lie still in bed. That's why when he was little he used to wet the bed, and so that no one would notice, he would wrap his soaked pajamas in his sheets..

The next night, when he was about to go back to sleep, he would find his sheets and pajamas clean again. Evidently, he knew it had been his mother, but she didn't tell anyone about it, and in fact, she didn't talk about it with Philip either.

As Philip rightly said during the session:

"I think my mother thought I would get through it. And I did, but when she died.".

It should be added, given the family environment, Philip never had a chance to talk to his mother. as the latter was always busy with the twins (who were younger than Philip), so, in Grosz's own words referring to his patient:

"He did not remember ever talking to her alone; one of his brothers or his father was always there. Bedwetting and her silence gradually became a kind of private conversation, something only they shared."

But this conversation disappeared when Philip's mother passed away suddenly. Which led Philip to replicate this kind of communication with everyone else. When Philip tells a lie to his listener, he trusts that the listener will say nothing and become an accomplice in his secret world..

From all this, it is clear that Philip's lies were not a personal attack on his interlocutors, but a way of maintaining the closeness he had known with his mother.which, moreover, was the only close communication he had with her.

In short, a compulsive liar is a liar because of experiential reasons.

Author's notes:

1 This case has been extracted from the book "The woman he did not want to love And other stories about the unconscious" pp. 57-6, ISBN: 978-84-9992-361-1; original title "The Examined Life".

2 Throughout his book, Stephen Grosz uses other names to refer to his patients, as well as other personal data to protect their confidentiality.