(Psychoanalytic Quarterly 1943, vol. 12, n° 4,
pp. 458-464.)
It is commonly asserted that women deviate more
readily from the truth than men. The feminine reaction to such a statement is
twofold : indignant denial on the one hand and, on the other, evasion, which
somehow implies unconscious agreement. It is this latter attitude which would
make it seem that the special choice of untruthfulness as a common and normal
feminine trait deserves further scrutiny.
My clinical material was obtained
unexpectedly and abruptly from a man treated by me some years ago. One day he
entered my office and, still standing at the door, exclaimed: " You
are the damnedest liar I have ever known ! " I was familiar with this
man's irritability, but I was puzzled by the suddenness and severity of his
outburst, which appeared without apparent analytic or external provocation like
the product of a vast, eruptive force.
The early portion of the hour was
filled with what the patient insisted were my lies. These were obviously
projections on the part of an individual who had always made ample use of this
mechanism. During these periods of projection the patient was singularly lacking
in what at other times seemed, even for a compulsive individual, a high degree
of true insight. Projection and insight alternated like a see-saw.
As the
anger wore off, the type of accusation came into relief. My 'lies', which, the
patient asserted, were those of most women, were lies of denial and omission.
Thus, according to him, I had (untruthfully) denied having made certain
important statements: I had failed to tell him this or that condition of
analysis, possibly in order to trick him into coming to me. The implication was
that if in these instances he had known the truth he would have had nothing more
to do with me.
Invariably whatever I supposedly had said or left unsaid was
a falsification of the facts in the direction of their denial. The patient
confronted me with statements which I was obliged to deny because in reality I
had not made them. But the patient was sure I had made them. At last it became
clear that he was confusing himself with me. He was prone, for example, to
forget to, answer a letter and then to deny that he had forgotten or indeed that
he had received the letter in the first place. He was frequently guilty of petty
negligence which obliged him to seek devious ways out. In part he gratified his
inner necessity to lie by creating these situations, in part by projecting the
lies upon women to whom lie was sexually attached and later in the analytic
situation upon me.
" Women ", he said at last and,
oddly enough, he was speaking at this moment not of my untruthfulness but of his
own, " are always denying their faults, their misdeeds. They tell you
they haven't been to dinner with so-and-so. They haven't been so long at the
hairdresser's. They assure you they haven't even dreamed of being unfaithful,
and wlien you confront them with the evidence they still deny it. They just keep
on saying it isn't so. "
On this note the resistance broke, and
the patient began discussing his relation to a younger sister. He had always
quarreled with her; but here even his customary ambivalence reached particular
heights. He stressed her great physical beauty, and their mutual and lifelong
antagonism. Memories and cover memories showed beyond any doubt the existence of
an old and intense relation between brother and sister.
At this point the
patient reiterated an assertion which had always puzzled me and which I was
inclined to question. He insisted that he loved the female genital, that he
found nothing unpleasant or, in his own words, frightening about it. But he
added: " What I really love is the genital of very little
girls ".
It now becomes apparent that this patient, like many
another little boy, had been confronted at an early age by incontestable
evidence of the nature of the female genital. He had been exposed to the sight
of his mother's genital as well as that of servant-girls. His reaction as
reflected in his neurosis was to turn from the mother to the father in an
extremely passive rôle. There was also evidence of what more closely
resembled an active homosexual attitude toward a younger brother.
But the
birth of the little sister made a new distribution of the phallic genital
possible, although in a direction contrary to the customary one. This patient
apparently accepted his mother's castration but not that of his sister. He
remarked that the whole area of the small girl's genital (meaning the
monsveneris and labia majora) was protuberant, as protuberant
as a penis. The absence of pubic hair further emphasized its phallic appearance.
Much as this patient consciously enjoyed the female genital, he was aware of an
aversion to pubic hair.
The entire genital of the young female child thus
was labeled phallic by the patient and accepted on that basis. But this
construction is after all merely a variation of the little boy's insistent
denial of the castration of any or all women. It is however a very pronounced
form of denial, which goes so far as to make desirable exactly that which is
undesirable and traumatic. Many of my subsequent observations were possible
because of the high degree to which this patient employed those early and
primitive mechanisms of denial and projection so widely used even in normal
childhood.
We are all familiar with the little boy's attempt to escape the
reality of female castration, at first by its complete denial and next by its
particular or partial distribution, as illustrated by the fantasy that every
grown-up has a penis and only some children have not. The adult man cannot
however maintain this denial without great detriment to his psychic health. Its
traces are to be found throughout the neuroses; and in the psychoses and
perversions it achieves its height, as in fetishism.
We know that at an
early age the normal boy, in his struggle to accept this particular reality,
succeeds in drawing a line between himself on the one hand and women and girls
on the other. He gives up his oedipal attachment to the mother to save himself
from castration; likewise he withdraws, as best he can, from any threatening
mother identification and consequent passive attachment to the father. He is
healthy in so far as he is successful in these attitudes. What we usually
consider the ‘normal male contempt’ for women contains the residue
of earlier feelings and the child's reaction against them. It would seem to me
that traces of the boy's original denial of castration are to be found in the
projection of this denial upon the woman: in other words, in the man's idea of
feminine untruthfulness. In accusing women of lying, the man rids himself of
a denial which, if maintained, would constitute a breach with reality; and on
the other hand, by the projection of this denial or 'lie' upon the woman, an
unconscious gratification is vicariously obtained.
Thus when my patient
accused me of lying, it was as if he were saying: " It is not I who
need to deny the facts, but you. And you must deny them for me, for I cannot
bear the fact that you have no penis. " I am reminded of a little
boy between four and five years of age, suffering from a severe castration trauma.
One day in very good spirits he told me the following story. A little girl had
pulled up her skirts for him and shown him - what did I think she had shown him?
I couldn't imagine. He said slowly: " A great big wee-wee thing-and
if you don't want to believe me, you needn't, because it's true anyway ".
Only after some time would he even admit that he, not she, had pulled up her
skirts. With this admission, the story began to break down. I said:
" Weren't you shocked? " " Shocked? " he
asked. " Yes ", I replied, " shocked at what you
really saw ". He sat up very straight and said categorically:
" I was shocked that she should show me such a thing ". It
took some time to clarify the ambiguity of the 'thing' he had seen.
There
can be no doubt that this little girl would have been delighted to display a
phallic-genital to my young patient. We are familiar with the girl's reactions
to her discovery of the sexual difference, her efforts to ascribe a phallus to
the mother and to deny her own castration in various ways at various periods of
development. Thus when the little boy denies the castration of his sister, he is
playing into her own wish for a penis. Common ground is found between the sexes
in the idea that the little girl has merely not yet acquired a penis; somewhat
less favored because more traumatic is the theory that masturbation has cost the
girl her penis. Both ideas invariably occur in the same individual, because the
phases of development overlap and because many theories, all ultimately
inadequate, are required to explain so dire a lack.
It might perhaps be
said that in given instances and always out of her own necessity the little girl
gladly takes up the boy's denial of her castration. Both, in a word, lie about
the nature of her genital. This lie is actually the denial of a lack: two
negatives which result in the positive assertion of an unfailing, never absent
phallus.
Lying as a symptom is familiar to all of us. Many years ago a case
of pathological lying which I attempted quite fruitlessly to analyze provided me
with the observation that lying of this type is the direct, adult continuation
of the childish lie about the genital. As a child this patient had fastened a
bit of wood to her genital and had persuaded herself that this, her penis, had
always been there and moreover always would ,be there. The stubborn lying of
many manifest male homosexuals differs somewhat from the foregoing in form but
not in content. In the analysis of the neuroses, periods of lying in otherwise
truthful individuals are of frequent occurrence. I recall another patient, a
young woman, in whom lying of a definite type had been a symptom all her life.
The lying of this girl, who had always been a tomboy, was directly traceable to
something more powerful than the usual illusory penis, something which we might
call a delusional penis.
This patient exhibited a curious mixture of
superfluous and inexplicable lying and what is often termed masculine
uprightness. Her sexual disturbances were the clinical reflection of her
bisexuality. In addition she had a panicky fear of growing old. A birthday
depressed her acutely. But even in the absence of birthdays she devoted many
analytic hours to her fear and horror of growing old. There were times when she
could not or would not remember her age; times when she informed me wrongly.
Never in the outside world did she reveal her actual age; her closest approach
to truth in this respect was to make herself at least one year
younger.
Here, then, is one of the traditional lies of women: the lie about
their age. Even the United States Government acknowledges this tradition, in
that various authorities - passport, voting registration, etc. - preferring not
to risk perjury, allow women to state merely that they are over twenty-one years
of age.
Thus it becomes apparent that once we admit the premise that men
believe women to be particularly prone to lie, especially by denial and
omission, we must answer the question as to whether or not this belief is
justified by stating that there exist certain facts, such as age, about which
women traditionally although of course not invariably do lie.
There is one
other great topic about which women do not tell the truth, about which indeed
they take it for granted that under given conditions only a lie is, appropriate.
I refer to the sexual gratification of women in coitus. The large majority of
women who do not experience orgasm during coitus deceive their sexual partners
and simulate the gratification which they fail to achieve. The legitimacy of
this simulation is unquestioned by the women involved.
This is not the
place to discuss the nature and function of orgasm in women, to what an extent
it may be masculine in origin or nature, etc. But I should like to call
attention to an assumption which perhaps throws light on the justification of
this pretense at gratification. The traditional masculine idea about women is
that they possess no authentic sexuality, no need and no desire for sexual
relations. It is as if all sexuality, being attributed to the phallus, were, as
the result of the acknowledgment of the absence of that phallus and out of some
strict, unconscious logic, denied to women.
Thus the lie about orgasm is
essentially an assertion of that phallic sexuality which women do not possess.
It constitutes a reassurance to both men and women.
I similarly interpret
women's tendency to lie about their age. So long as they are young there remains
the possibility, as in childhood, of their somehow acquiring a penis. The allure
of feminine youth for men is fundamentally of the same nature as the dread of
old age in women. There is a saying to the effect that there is nobody as happy
as an old maid once she has given up hoping. Or I might paraphrase: while there
is youth, there is hope.
