Why We Lie: The Source of our Disasters. Dorothy Rowe

that, if we touch something very hot, we must withdraw our hand immediately.

      In her book, Reddy mentions what she calls the ‘disintegration’ of the self following bereavement or shock.⁵ In psychoanalytic literature, such ‘shock’ is referred to as trauma. For the baby this can occur when the ‘good’ mother suddenly turns into the ‘bad’ mother. The smiling mother might suddenly become angry, or distant, or vanish and not return. Whenever we suffer a trauma or a bereavement, we discover that the world is not what we thought it was. Some of our ideas are disconfirmed, and we feel ourselves falling apart. We have to find ways of protecting ourselves from trauma, and, if this happens, ways of holding our sense of self together.

      At about nine months babies discover that they can protect themselves by refusing to obey orders. However, adults are more powerful than infants, and they can punish those who disobey. When the refusal to obey fails to protect infants, they have to learn how to lie. But before they can do this, they have to discover the two prerequisites of lying.

      To lie you must first know the truth.

      The person you wish to lie to must be capable of being deceived.

      From the moment newborn babies gaze upon the world they are in the business of discovering what is going on. They want to discover this for themselves, and, as soon as they can point at something, they want to share this information with the people around them. Reddy wrote, ‘From about 12 to 18 months toddlers effortfully, selectively and appropriately inform other people truthfully about reality, often telling people things they don’t appear to know or may “need” to know.’⁶ They offer other people information, and they are capable of selecting among several adults those adults who lack certain information that the other adults already have.

      A number of recent studies have found that even fifteen-month-old toddlers seem to be able to detect that other people can have false beliefs about reality. Well before they can tell a lie, infants discover how to deceive. They quickly grasp the principle of ‘What the eye doesn’t see the heart doesn’t grieve over.’ If your mother does not want you to do something, wait until she is out of the room. The psychologist Judy Dunn has shown that toddlers of no more than sixteen months can discover what would upset or please their mother or their siblings, and then do it.⁷ Such young children fail the Piagetian tests for understanding the general principle that other people can hold false beliefs. However, the people whose minds you need to be able to read early in your life are your nearest and dearest, because they are the people who can easily annihilate you as a person, or give you the kind of affirmation that brings the greatest joy to your heart.

      Most of us are born into families where the parents hold differing views on a great many subjects. It does not take us long to discover that we can get a biscuit from Dad by giving him a cuddle, whereas a biscuit from Mum comes only as a reward for doing something she wants us to do. Once we discover that our parents have very different views on what constitutes clean hands or the very last story before going to sleep, we can elaborate our tactics for deceiving our parents. However, some children are born to parents who decide that they will appear to their children to agree in their views about everything. Not being offered alternative interpretations of events, the child believes that his parents see everything exactly as it is, and are therefore not susceptible to being deceived.

      In his biography of his father Philip Gosse, Edmund Gosse described how he had seen his parents in this way, and what a shock it was to him when he discovered that his father could be in error. Philip Gosse was a colleague of Charles Darwin, a painstaking biologist, and a devout Plymouth Brethren, as was his wife. Edmund Gosse wrote,

      In consequence of hearing so much about an Omniscient God, a being of supernatural wisdom and penetration who was always with us, who made, in fact, a fourth in our company, I had come to think of Him, not without awe, but with absolute confidence. My Father and Mother, in their serene discipline of me, never argued with one another, never differed; their wills seemed absolutely as one. My Mother always deferred to my Father, and in his absence spoke of him to me, as if he were all-wise. I confused him in some sense with God; in all events I believed that my Father knew everything and saw everything. One morning in my sixth year, my Mother and I were alone in the morning room, when my Father came in and announced some fact to us… I remember turning quickly, in embarrassment, and looking into the fire. The shock was to me as a thunderbolt, for what my Father had said was not true. My Mother and I, who had been present at the trifling incident, were aware that it had not happened exactly as it had been reported to him. My Mother gently told him so, and he accepted the correction. Nothing could have possibly been more trifling to my parents, but to me it was an epoch. Here was an appalling discovery, never suspected before, that my Father was not as God, and did not know everything. The shock was not caused by any suspicion that he was not telling the truth, as it appeared to him, but by the awful proof that he was not, as I had supposed, omniscient.⁸

      Not long after this incident, Edmund chanced upon some tools which workmen had left in the garden near a small rockery built by his father with what Edmund described as ‘a pretty parasol of water’. Edmund wondered whether one of these tools could make a hole in the base of the water pipe to the little fountain. He made the hole, and moved on, thinking about other things. Several days later his father came in to dinner very angry. He turned on the tap to the fountain, and water rushed through the hole. The rockery was ruined. Edmund was ‘frozen with alarm’ and waiting to be blamed. However, his mother pointed out that the plumbers had probably caused the damage, and his father agreed. Edmund was ‘turned to stone within, but outwardly sympathetic and with unchecked appetite’. He wrote,

      The emotions which now thronged within me, and led me with an almost unwise alacrity to seek solitude in the back garden, were not moral at all, they were intellectual. I was not ashamed of having successfully – and so surprisingly – deceived my parents by my crafty silence; I looked upon that as a providential escape, and dismissed all further thought of it. I had other things to think of.

      In the first place, the theory that my Father was omniscient or infallible was now dead and buried. He probably knew very little; in this case he had not known a fact of such importance that if you did not know that, it could hardly matter what you knew. My Father, as a deity, as a natural force of immense prestige, fell in my eyes to a human level. In future, his statements about things in general need not be accepted implicitly. But of all the thoughts that rushed upon my savage and undeveloped little brain at this crisis, the most curious was that I had found a companion and confidant in myself. There was a secret in this world and it belonged to me and to somebody who lived in the same body with me. There were two of us, and we could talk to one another. It is difficult to define impressions so rudimentary, but it is certain that it was in this dual form that the sense of my individuality now suddenly descended on me, and it is equally certain that it was a great solace to me to find a sympathizer in my own breast.⁹

      The events in childhood that come to define who we are often are events that in themselves are insignificant. What is of immense importance are the conclusions we draw from these experiences. In this successful deception of his parents, Edmund was made aware of both his sense of being a person and the lifelong dialogue between himself and his closest ally, himself. He learned that he could separate himself from what was going on around him. He could take up the position of being an observer, and discuss his observations with himself.

      Edmund, an only child, spent considerable time entertaining himself, and so he could conduct long conversations with himself. His parents made it very clear to him that they wanted him to be a godly child, and he tried to conform outwardly to their wishes. However, he knew that he was not a godly child, and he never pretended to himself that he was. Because his parents never inflicted physical punishments, he was not placed in situations where he had to take a stand against their attacks on his sense of being a person. He did not have to defy his parents the way that beaten children do, by claiming that the parents’ assaults did not hurt. He was a loving, respectful son