There aren’t many, but there are people who lie in therapy.  Lie to whom? To themselves, for sure. But who exactly does the therapist represent that it is “necessary” lying to him?

By the best of the hypothesis, the therapist stands for the patient’s consciousness. By the worst, for a mother (or a father). Because the parental figure has always been a child’s reference for good behavior, revealing the truth to a parent is like admitting something and becoming aware of what one has done. Therefore, the therapist is a mother of father’s vicarious.

There are therapist who in fact set themselves as big moms and dads of their patients giving them directions about what is “right” and “wrong”. Thus, these professionals occupy a place already prepared, only waiting to be fulfilled by anyone. Everybody has parents, hence the parent-child dynamic comes settled in the patient’s psychology. It’s easy and quick the identification of the latter with the child’s role, delegating to the therapist one of the parental figures.

However both positions are precarious, for they can be kept only thanks to the maintenance of the complementary roles: a child on one side, a parent on the other. A great part of psychological problems are generated precisely by these roles, that is by they hold back or disturb the process of individuation, and therefore, the growth of the person who seeks therapy.

If we can say that any analytical relation starts referring to the traditional roles, surely it’s not its meaning. The psychotherapist’s function is to promote the patient’s conscience about the roles he or she plays in life, including the child’s one. The psychotherapy’s purpose is to stimulate the birth of reflexive subjects, conscious people who not only are able to look outside themselves in a critical and as much as possible objective way, but also are able to “bend over” their own psyche and reflect about themselves.

Inevitably, this is solely possible if the person has a minimum of honesty with himself (and this is meant for analyst and patient). Lying in therapy has the purpose to exorcize the fright of taking conscience. A person lies to avoid finding themselves face to face with their own reality. Lying in therapy is different of not being conscious of something one does or feels, this is a common situation that is overcome in time. But there are people who lie in therapy in total lucidity. They know they are lying (if they didn’t they would be psychiatric material). In this case, it’s a wasting of time and money.

How does one find out the lies? If the therapist is honest with herself and is not there to represent a role and grant herself a salary at the end of the month, she will feel the lie and she’ll confirm her feeling by the patient’s dreams and the involuntary signals that escape of the patient’s control.

Psychotherapy is primarily relationship and the psychotherapist is (or should be) and highly sharpened tool of perception of the relation’s reality–an intellectual, affective, intuitive and sentimental perception. Psychotherapy is not only “relation”, but a love relation, because only loving the other person we can help him (see Silvia Montefoschi). What the therapist loves is the blossoming of the reflexive subject, a person emancipating himself, the evolution of the being. If the therapist is in this perspective she or he would realize that the other one is walking in a different direction, as much as in a couple the cheating of one part is felt by the other, unless there is conniving.

Lies betray the essence of the psycho therapeutic relation and put it in a level that necessarily is not going to last. Lying in therapy constitutes the patient’s check mate against himself. Accepting lies knowing that they are conscious ways of manipulation, is, on the therapist side, a form to sabotage her own work, for in spite of the patient’s compulsion to lie, he’s there supposedly to overcome it. Thus, it’s up to the psychotherapist to offer him this chance. Do or die, but this is life, isn’t it?

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