Why Lying Is a Developmental Achievement (And Problem)

We’re told never to lie. We’re told to be truthful at all times. But for a child, learning to lie is a developmental achievement. One of a child’s earliest games is peek-a-boo: hiding behind a hand or a toy or a piece of furniture and then re-appearing with a cry of “Boo!”. Developmentally, the game is important, suggesting to the child that he or she can be unseen yet not forgotten and that the other person in the room can disappear yet still exist. Winnicott (1965) describes the importance of “….a child establishing a private self that is not communicating, and at the same time wanting to communicate and to be found. It is a sophisticated game of hide-and-seek in which it is a joy to be hidden but disaster not to be found” (p186). This characterizes the behaviour of so many children and young people: it’s a joy to be able to hide but, equally, a disaster never to be found.

So telling a lie is a kind of peek-a-boo. Will I be discovered? Will my lie be exposed? Or will I get away with it? Can I pretend to be something I’m not? Growing up is really a sophisticated, benign form of lying: trying out different personas, seeing what meets with approval and what doesn’t, what feels comfortable and what doesn’t. And telling a story – especially an autobiographical story – is also a form of lying: shaping the story to fit the audience, exaggerating or playing down various elements and, if necessary, inventing new bits, realizing that there are degrees of lying, that untruths can be mixed in with truths to create a story that satisfies everyone.

But growing up is also about finding out what makes us happy and what stops us feeling anxious. And lies, we start to realize, don’t make us happy because they force us to be something that we’re not. They make us anxious. We can persist with the lie, insist on the pretence, but we live in fear of being exposed and shamed. For young people, lying is no longer fun, no longer a game of peek-a-boo. They’re no longer irresponsible children fooling around. Now it’s deadly serious.

So when young people do tell lies, they’re regressing temporarily, going back to an earlier place where they could hide behind the furniture and see if they’d be found. And like all of us, when they regress, they do so for good reasons: because they’re scared, afraid of taking responsibility, afraid of being exposed as inadequate in some way.

Some get stuck in that regressed developmental place, never finding a way out, never able to develop other personas. A ‘pathological’ liar might be someone for whom the lie has become the person. If there was never an original sense of self to fall back on, if there was never any truth before the lie, then the lie becomes a way of life, a necessary adaptation that holds everything together, however precariously. It becomes a matter of survival.

It’s worth thinking about people who habitually lie - whether they’re ordinary young people or prime ministers and presidents - as people lacking any other sense of self, as people who return to lying as a developmental fallback. Of course the threat of exposure is terrifying, but if you’ve become the lie, if that’s who you are, then there’s nothing to expose.