BY N. R. AMANCHERLA, M.A.

Truth has always been identified with God. A truthful man has always been a philosopher’s dream, a moralist’s ideal and a layman’s despair. It has always been a coveted virtue whose attainment has been most unlikely.

Lying, on the other hand, is the most natural thing. Like other vices to which the flesh is heir, it has about it a certain inexorability and a fatal compulsion. It is a thing which unconsciously stands out firmly in us but which we have to weed out consciously.

What is so natural and compelling about telling lies? Even children of four or five, who are supposed to be nearest to Heaven, are also known to lie without any previous training. "Did you steal the mangoes off the table?" Back comes the ready reply from the guilty one, "No." The example makes clear the compelling nature of lying in one of its significant aspects. A lie, like fear, is a defence mechanism. We tell lies when we are cornered, when our mind scents danger to our personality either external or internal. It is not merely the guilty or the accused who tell obnoxious lies; it is even the most innocent and chaste who sometimes contradict themselves, when pressed on all sides by danger. Many criminal lawyers and expert detectives succeed professionally by driving innocent people to take refuge in falsehood. Lying is, thus, a most natural reaction to a painful situation, a most normal phenomenon.

An internal danger also may drive us sometimes to tell lies. When sometimes tempted by our inner psyche to do something anti-social, say to make love to our neighbour’s good- looking wife, we violently resist this inner impulse by repeating to ourselves, and possibly to others by way of screwing up courage, that she is horrid and ugly.

A third category of lies consists of those which have a criminal intent and have some ulterior motive. They are volitional and conscious, without any endopsychic compulsion. They betray a lack of character. Here, of course, we are concerned only with the lies that are uttered by the mentally healthy who desire to gain some end or other.

There is altogether a different kind of telling lies which many of us notice without stopping to consider either their psychic value or scientific basis. In the above category the liar was fully aware that he was telling a lie and also aware that, but for the tension of the moment, he would not have had recourse to it. Nobody would be more sorry for it and aware of it than the culprit himself. Now we come across some people, who habitually, at all times and all places, under the least provocation, lie grandly without shame or any sense of guilt. What is worse, they enjoy telling them. What is ‘worser’ still, they believe in them. A kind of psychopathic self-deception takes place. The club bore is the supreme example of this type of liar. Who has not heard of his exploits in love or business or sport, and who believes him? Many young girls or young men delight in relating amorous adventures which never really happened.

The ideational content of these lies, like day-dreams, has its origin in some unconscious wish-fulfillment. They satisfy an endopsychic wish, an unconscious urge, and the fulfillment of such a wish or urge is through lies or day-dreams. In fact, it can be said that all of us have wishes which we have repressed on account of their painful or anti-social content, and which we hope (where they are pleasant but anti-social} would only come true. So we realise those wishes to the nearest point of actuality by telling ourselves or others that they had been realised and truly. But on the affective side this kind of lying works in a remarkably economic manner. The wish-fulfillment factor is carried out to the satisfaction of the unconscious mind but with little friction with reality in the outside world. In fact, apart from its normality, lying is a necessary mechanism. All the wishes in us, especially those of a slightly barbaric, infantile or anti-social character, can never really be carried out in this world. They stand in us self-condemned but refusing to be weeded out. They have to be shown an outlet. Where such wishes are of a pleasurable but immoral nature, they will work themselves out in the form of lies or day-dreams or more complex things. Whether they become fixations or fetishes depends on their psychic colouring and intensity.

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