In this article I am going to narrate the story (1), the analysis and the results reached by the American psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz with one of his patients. Said 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 met his wife by chance and she, with tears in her eyes, asked him please if they could talk about the possible options they had for treat her husband’s lung cancer. As the doctor told him, Philip was actually completely healthy. but apparently, he had made up this lie to tell his wife.
In addition to this fact, during the first session, Philip confessed other of his countless lies to Grosz himself:
Too risky lies?
If there is something that the psychoanalyst soon realized, it was that his patient He didn’t seem to care that his “victims” knew he was lying. In fact, as Grosz tells it, when he asked him if he cared if they thought he was a liar:
“He shrugged.”
And he added that the people he lied to rarely challenged him. In fact, his wife simply accepted her husband’s miraculous recovery; or in the case of her father-in-law, that she simply remained silent.
On the other hand, when asked about how his lies affected his work environment, he argued that in him, “everyone lies ” (he is a television producer).
Lying to the therapist
From the first moment, Grosz was well aware of the possibility that his patient was lying to him as well. and this happened a month after starting therapy. She stopped paying.
It took him five months to pay and until the moment he paid the fees, told lies of all kinds since he had lost his checkbook, until he had donated his money to the Freud House Museum.
The moment he finally paid, he supposed on the one hand, a relief and on the other, a concern. At that moment she realized that she had been telling him bigger and bigger lies to avoid paying, but more importantly, she began to understand why she 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 withdrawing, becoming more and more reserved.
It was then that the possibility dawned on Philip that he was taking advantage of that social convention according to which we remain silent when someone lies to us. But this would not explain why you need to get that control over the situation and provoke such silences.
This point was the central focus of therapy for the following year.
The root of the problem
As it could not be otherwise, they talked about their childhood and their family. Apparently there was no notable data that seemed to explain the reason for his pathology. Until one day, Philip recounted a seemingly insignificant event, which turned out to be transcendental.
From the age of three he shared a room with his two twin brothers. Sometimes she woke up in the middle of the night because of the noise made by the customers leaving a pub opposite his house. When this happened, sometimes he would have to urinate but he would stay still in bed. This is why when he was little he used to wet the bed, and so that no one would notice, wrapped his soaked pajamas with his sheets.
The next night, when he was ready to sleep again, he found his sheets and pajamas clean again. Evidently, he knew that she had been her mother, but she didn’t tell anyone what happened, and in fact, she didn’t talk to Philip about it either.
As Philip said during the session:
“I think my mother thought I would get over it. And I did, but when she died.”
It should be added that given the family atmosphere, Philip never had the chance to talk to his mother since she was always busy with the twins (who were younger than Philip), so, in the words of Grosz himself referring to his patient:
“I didn’t remember ever talking to her alone; one of her brothers or her father was always there. “Her bed-wetting and her silence gradually became a kind of private conversation, something only they shared.”
But this conversation disappeared when Philip’s mother died suddenly. Which led Philip to reproduce this type of communication with other people. When Philip tells a lie to his listener, Trust him not to say anything and become an accomplice in his secret world.
From all this, it follows that Philip’s lies were not a personal attack on his interlocutors, but a way to maintain that closeness that he had known with his mother which was also the only close communication he had with her.
In short, a compulsive liar is one because experiential reasons.
Author’s Notes:
1 This case has been extracted from the book “The woman who did not want to love And other stories about the unconscious” pages. 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 information to protect their confidentiality.
