Can we lie to ourselves?
Publié le 21/05/2017
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Human psyche according to Freud
: Guardian
Believing in this hypothesis of the unconscious, would enable us to understand
the possibility of self-lying by repression.
The existence of an entity which is
independent from all control and slips out from a spontaneous knowledge
divides our mind into two independent beings that could deceive one another.
However exciting this idea is, I think misses from this reasoning an idea of will,
it diminishes the extend of this lie.
Furthermore, the origins of the « psychic
tendencies » which are in the unconscious are yet to be clarified.
If they
spontaneously appear, can we talk of deceit ? And if it is nothing but an
oversight, is it a real lie, designed to delude the conscious about the truth ? It
could also very well be mere bad faith.
For Jean-Paul Sartre, theorist of existentialism, bad faith is the other side of
liberty ; like the two faces of a coin, they are absolutely opposed and yet
inseparable.
He develops this thesis in a famous image of his, the Parisian
« garçon de café ».
Everything, in the garçons de café's (basically waiters)
behaviour seems to show that they are truly impregnated of their jobs, they
think of themselves as being fundamentally and essentially waiters.
However :
« the waiter cannot be entirely waiter, in the sense that this inkwell is inkwell,
that this glass is glass » (J-P.
Sartre, Being and Nothingness , 1943).
When the
waiter gets home for instance, does he still act the same ? Undoubtedly not,
and yet he lies to himself all day long by thinking that his job is what he is,; he
is not being honest to himself and thus renounces to his liberty.
According to
Sartre, men lie to themselves permanently to escape from the harrowing liberty
of our being which is nothing but nothingness, vacuity.
This theory is very different from Freud's; by putting repression at the center of
our identity, the latter determines men by their past and something that is
beyond our sphere of influence.
On the other hand, Sartre states that the
unconscious does not exist ; it is only a part of one's mind that is occulted by
bad faith and our total liberty allows anyone to reinvent himself every second.
There are other pieces of example that shows the absolute necessity of
self-honesty.
We can think for instance of prejudices which are thoughts that we
do not know about but that yet influence us.
They vanish as soon as we
become aware, often through a third party, of their existence but I believe that
they are lies that we tell ourselves, without knowing.
When a racist woman
tightens her grip on her wallet when crossing the road of a black person, it is an
unconscious lie.
Another interesting case in my opinion happens when someone is driven by
something overtaking himself or that he is yearning for something beyond his
own existence.
It is for example probable that all Nazis did not believe in Unconscious Conscious.
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