By |

The Psychology of Self-Deception

Narcissus, by Caravaggio.
Narcissus meets himself. Or does he?

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

How well do you know yourself? Probably not as well as you think. Much of what we believe about ourselves is shaped by psychological processes whose very purpose is to prevent us from knowing ourselves. These processes are known as ego defences.

In psychoanalytic theory, ego defences are unconscious processes that we deploy to defuse the fear and anxiety that arise when who we think we are or who we think we should be (our conscious ‘superego’) comes into conflict with who we really are (our unconscious ‘id’).

For instance, at an unconscious level a man may find himself physically attracted to another man, but at a conscious level he may find this attraction flatly unacceptable. To defuse the anxiety or tension that arises from this conflict, he may deploy one or more ego defences.

For example, (1) he might refuse to admit to himself that he is attracted to a man. Or (2) he might superficially adopt attitudes and behaviours that are diametrically opposed to those of a stereotypical homosexual, such as going out for several pints with the lads, banging his fists on the counter, and peppering his speech with loud profanities. Or (3) he might transfer his attraction onto someone else and then berate him for being gay.

In each case, he has used a common ego defence, respectively, (1) repression, (2) reaction formation, and (3) projection. Let’s go through each of these in turn.

Repression and Denial

Repression can be thought of as ‘motivated forgetting’: the active, albeit unconscious, ‘forgetting’ of unacceptable drives, emotions, and ideas. Repression is readily confused with denial, which is the refusal to admit to uncomfortable aspects of reality. But whereas repression relates to mental stimuli, denial relates to external stimuli, to things that are ‘out there’. For example, if my partner is cheating on me, I can fail to recognise this (denial), or initially recognise it but then keep it right out of my mind (repression).

Distortion

Repression can also be confused with distortion, which is the reshaping of reality to suit one’s inner needs. For instance, a person who has been beaten black and blue by his father no longer recalls these traumatic events (repression), and instead sees his father as a gentle and loving man (distortion). In this example, there is a clear sense of the distortion building upon the repression, and at the same time buttressing it. Like this, ego defences often build upon one another—into something resembling Notre-Dame Cathedral.

Reaction Formation

Reaction formation is the superficial adoption—and, often, exaggeration—of emotions and impulses that are diametrically opposed to one’s own. A possible high-profile case of reaction formation is that of a certain US congressman, who, as chairman of the Missing and Exploited Children’s Caucus, introduced legislation to protect children from exploitation by adults over the Internet. The congressman resigned when it later emerged that he had been sending sexually explicit messages to a teenage boy. Other, classic, examples of reaction formation include the covert alcoholic who extols the virtues of abstinence, and the privileged student who attends and even organises anti-capitalist rallies.

Projection

Projection involves the attribution of one’s own unacceptable thoughts, feelings, and impulses to others. Like distortion, projection involves repression as a first step, since unacceptable thoughts, feelings, and impulses need to be repudiated before they can be re-assigned. Classic examples of projection include the envious person who believes that everyone envies them, the person with fantasies of infidelity who is convinced that their partner is cheating on them, and the covetous person who lives in constant fear of being dispossessed.

Splitting

Just as common is splitting, which involves the division or polarisation of beliefs and people into good and bad by perceiving only their positive or negative attributes. This is often seen in politics, for instance, when left-wingers caricature right-wingers as selfish and narrow-minded, and right-wingers left-wingers as hypocritical and irresponsible—or ‘deplorables’ and ‘elites’, ‘snowflakes’ and ‘rednecks’. Other classic examples of splitting are the religious zealot who divides people into blessed and damned, and the child of divorcees who idolises one parent while blocking out the other. Splitting defuses the anxiety that arises from our inability to grasp a complex and nuanced state of affairs by simplifying and schematising it and making it easier to process.

Idealisation

Similar to splitting is the ego defence of idealisation. Like the positive end of splitting, idealisation involves overestimating the positive attributes of a person, object, or idea, while skirting over its negative attributes. More fundamentally, it involves the projection of our needs and desires onto that person, object, or idea.

A paradigm of idealisation is infatuation, when love is confused with the need to love, and the idealised person’s negative traits are glossed over or even recast into a positive light. Although this can make for a rude awakening, there are few better ways of relieving our existential anxiety than by manufacturing something that is ‘perfect’ for us, be it a piece of equipment, a place, country, person, or god.

Intellectualisation

If in love with someone unavailable or unattainable, it may be more convenient to intellectualise our love, maybe even by thinking of it in terms of idealisation! In intellectualisation, uncomfortable feelings associated with a problem are repressed by thinking of the problem in cold or abstract terms. I once received a phone call from a junior doctor in psychiatry in which he described a recent in-patient admission as ‘a 47-year-old mother of two who attempted to cessate her life as a result of being diagnosed with a metastatic mitotic lesion’. A formulation such as ‘…who tried to kill herself after being told that she is dying of cancer’ would have been much better English, but all too effective at evoking the full horror of this poor lady’s predicament.

Rationalisation (Sour Grapes and Sweet Lemons)

Intellectualisation should not be confused with rationalisation, which is the use of feeble but seemingly plausible arguments either to justify something that is painful to accept (‘sour grapes’) or to make it seem ‘not so bad after all’ (‘sweet lemons’). For example, a person who has been rejected by a love interest might convince himself that she rejected him because she did not share in his ideal of happiness (sour grapes); and also that her rejection is a blessing in disguise insofar as it has freed him to find someone more suitable, or ‘play the field’ (sweet lemons).

Displacement and Sublimation

While no one can altogether avoid using ego defences, some ego defences are considered more ‘mature’ than others: not only because they involve some degree of insight, but also because they can be adaptive or useful. If a person is angry at his boss, he might go home and kick the dog, or he might instead go out and play a good game of tennis. The first instance (kicking the poor dog) is an example of displacement, the redirection of uncomfortable feelings towards someone or something less important, which is clearly an immature ego defence. The second instance (playing a good game of tennis) is an example of sublimation, the channelling of uncomfortable feelings into socially condoned and often productive activities, which is a far more mature ego defence.

Altruism

There are a number of mature ego defences, like sublimation, that can be substituted for the more primitive ones, like displacement. Altruism, for instance, can in some cases be a form of sublimation in which we deal with our issues by stepping outside ourself and helping others. By concentrating on the needs of others, people in altruistic vocations such as medicine, nursing, and teaching may be able to permanently push their own needs into the background. Conversely, people who care for a disabled or elderly person may experience profound anxiety and distress should this role be removed from them.

Humour

Another mature ego defence is humour. By seeing the absurd or ridiculous aspect of an emotion, event, or situation, we are able to look at it in a less threatening light. If laughter is proper to man, this must be because we, of all animals, have the most developed unconscious. The things that we laugh about the most are: our errors and inadequacies; the difficult challenges that we face around personal identity, social relationships, and death; and incongruity, absurdity, and meaninglessness. These are all deeply human concerns: just as no one has ever seen a laughing dog, so no one has ever heard of a laughing god.

Asceticism

Further up the maturity scale is asceticism, which is the denial of the importance of that which most people fear or strive for—and so of the very grounds for anxiety and depression. If fear is, ultimately, for oneself, then the denial of the self removes the very grounds of fear. People in modern societies such as ours are much more anxious than people in traditional or historical societies, no doubt because of the strong emphasis that modern societies place on the self as an independent and autonomous agent, that is, as an ego or ‘I’.

Who, Then, Am I?

There are a great many ego defences, and the combinations and circumstances in which we use them are a reflection of our personality. Indeed, one could go so far as to argue that the self is nothing but the sum of its ego defences, which are constantly shaping, upholding, protecting, and repairing it.

If a castle amounts to no more than its fortifications, what are those fortifications protecting but themselves?

The self is like a cracked mask that is in constant need of being pieced together. But behind the mask there is nobody at home. To know ourselves, then, is not to peel back our defences until we arrive at some core self, but to become more conscious of those defences and, in time, to refine them.

Such self-knowledge, if we have the courage for it, can awaken us to ourselves, to others, and to the world around us, and free us to achieve our fullest, highest potential as human beings. Perhaps, in the end, that is what a person is: their degree of openness—whereas a highly defended person is more like a bugged robot.

The greatest oracle of the ancient world was at Delphi, and there, inscribed on the forecourt of the temple of Apollo, was a simple two-word command:

Γνῶθι σεαυτόν

Know thyself.

Continue Exploring

If this essay spoke to you, you might look into Hide and Seek: The Psychology of Self-Deception.

You may also enjoy

Explore all Self-Deception essays

By |

The Psychology and Philosophy of Pity, Sympathy, Empathy, and Compassion

A doctor or nurse empathizing with a patient
Empathy begins with the simple but profound attempt to see the world through another person’s eyes.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Essay substantially revised on 22 July 2026.

Article summary: Empathy and sympathy are often confused, but they are not the same. This article explores the psychology and philosophy of pity, sympathy, empathy, and compassion, explaining how they differ, why they matter, and what they reveal about human nature.

The terms empathy and sympathy are often used interchangeably, but they are not the same. Sympathy is care or concern for another person’s suffering. Empathy goes a step further: it involves understanding and, to some extent, sharing in that person’s emotional experience. Compassion, which involves the desire to relieve suffering, builds upon empathy. These distinctions matter—not only in psychology and medicine, but also in friendship, parenting, education, and everyday life.

Suppose a friend has just lost a parent. If I say, ‘I’m so sorry this has happened to you,’ I’m expressing sympathy. If I can also imagine, however imperfectly, what this loss feels like from within their own world, I begin to empathise. If that empathy inspires me to support them through their grief, it becomes compassion.

Before examining these concepts, it is worth asking where the modern idea of empathy came from.

What Is Empathy?

In 1909, the psychologist Edward Titchener translated the German Einfühlung (‘feeling into’) as empathy. At that time, German philosophers discussed empathy in the context of artistic or aesthetic evaluation, but Titchener proposed that empathy can also help us to recognise one another as minded beings.

Today, empathy might be defined as a person’s ability to understand and, to a greater or lesser extent, share in the emotions of another person, fictional character, or sentient being. Empathy involves two closely related capacities: (1) seeing another person’s situation from their embodied perspective, and (2) resonating with, or sharing in, the emotions that they are feeling.

For me to share another person’s point of view, it is not enough merely to put myself into their position or situation. Instead, I must go further still and imagine myself as them, and, more than that, imagine myself as them in the situation in which they find themself. One cannot empathise with an abstract or detached feeling, only with a particular person. To empathise with them, I need to have some understanding of who they are and what they are doing, or trying to do. I need to have some idea of where they came from and where they want to go. As John Steinbeck famously wrote:

It means very little to know that a million Chinese are starving unless you know one Chinese who is starving.

Pity, Sympathy, Empathy, and Compassion

Empathy is easily confused with pity, sympathy, and compassion, which are all prosocial reactions to the plights of others. Let us look at each one in turn.

Pity is a feeling of discomfort at the distress of one or more sentient beings and usually carries paternalistic overtones. Inherent in the notion of pity is that its object does not deserve its plight, and is incapable of preventing or overturning it. Pity is less engaged than sympathy, empathy, or compassion, often amounting to little more than a conscious acknowledgement of another’s suffering.

Sympathy (Greek, ‘fellow feeling’ or ‘community of feeling’) is care or concern for someone, often someone close or relatable, accompanied by a wish to see them better off. Compared with pity, sympathy implies a greater sense of shared similarities and deeper personal engagement. But unlike empathy, sympathy need not involve a shared perspective or shared emotions, and while the facial expressions of sympathy convey caring and concern, they do not ordinarily convey shared distress.

Sympathy and empathy often lead to one another, but not invariably. For instance, it is possible to sympathise with a hedgehog but not, strictly speaking, to empathise with it, since our access to its subjective experience is necessarily limited. Conversely, psychopaths with little or no sympathy for their victims may nonetheless possess sufficient understanding of another person’s thoughts and motivations to ensnare and manipulate them.

Sympathy might also be distinguished from benevolence, which is a more detached and impersonal attitude—akin to the attitude that I might have towards my students or neighbours, or that a monarch might have towards his or her subjects.

Compassion (Latin, ‘suffering alongside’) is more engaged than empathy and is associated with an active desire to alleviate the suffering of its object. With empathy, I share your emotions; with compassion I not only share your emotions but also elevate them into a universal and transcending experience. Compassion, which builds upon empathy, is one of the principal motivators of altruism.

Researcher Brené Brown has done much to popularise the distinction between sympathy and empathy, arguing that sympathy creates distance while empathy creates connection. Her work has helped bring empathy to a much wider audience. Even so, sympathy need not be distant or dismissive. Properly understood, it is often the beginning of empathy rather than its opposite.

The relationship between pity, sympathy, empathy, and compassion can be summarised as follows:

Can We Ever Know Another Mind?

My friend tearfully confides that, as a child, she was sexually abused by her father. Moved by her plight, I try to comfort her:

‘I know just how you feel.’

To my surprise and alarm, she snaps back:

‘No, you don’t know how I feel! How could you?’

Notice that, in claiming that I cannot know how she feels, my friend is implying that she knows how I feel—or, at least, that however I might be feeling, it is not how she feels. But if she is correct in asserting that I cannot know how she feels, how can she know how I feel, or that how I feel is not how she feels?

A similar paradox is raised in the Zhuangzi (c. third century BCE), one of the two foundational texts of Taoism:

Zhuangzi and Hui Shi were strolling on the bridge above the Hao River. Zhuangzi said, ‘Out swim the minnows so free and easy; this is the happiness of fish.’ Hui Shi said, ‘You are not a fish. Whence do you know the happiness of fish?’ Zhuangzi said, ‘You are not me. Whence do you know I don’t know the happiness of fish?’ Hui Shi said, ‘Granted that I am not you, I don’t know about you. Then granted that you are not a fish, the case for your not knowing the happiness of fish is complete.’ Zhuangzi said, ‘Let’s trace back to the root of the issue. When you said, ‘Whence do you know the fish are happy?’, you asked me already knowing I knew it. I knew it from up above the Hao.’

The exchange captures an enduring philosophical puzzle. We can never inhabit another person’s consciousness. Yet, in everyday life, we routinely understand enough of one another’s inner worlds to communicate, cooperate, comfort, teach, love, and forgive. How is this possible?

Theory of Mind and Mirror Neurons

Empathy rests upon what psychologists call theory of mind: the ability to understand that different people see the world from different perspectives and possess different beliefs, desires, sensitivities, commitments, and forms of understanding.

Some writers distinguish between cognitive empathy and affective empathy. From a philosophical point of view, however, it is preferable to distinguish theory of mind from empathy, rather than to divide empathy into ‘cognitive’ and ‘affective’ forms, thereby obscuring the distinct role of theory of mind. On this view, theory of mind forms the cognitive basis for empathy, while empathy itself also involves emotional resonance.

Theory of mind is innate (‘from up above the Hao’), first appearing at about four years of age. Thereafter, it continues to develop, and can be trained in both reach and accuracy. Crucially, theory of mind enables us to posit the intentions of others and to explain and predict their actions.

Researchers have proposed that mirror neurons contribute to this capacity. These neurons fire both when we carry out a particular action and when we witness that same action in someone else. By internally modelling the actions of others, they may help us infer some of the thoughts, emotions, and desires that gave rise to them. Although empathy and theory of mind involve a broader network of cognitive processes, mirror neurons offer one suggestive illustration of how we may come to understand the experiences of others.

Why Did Empathy Evolve?

From an evolutionary standpoint, empathy has been selected for because it promotes parental care, prosocial behaviour, and non-verbal communication, and, by extension, the survival of the proximal gene pool. By supporting social interaction, collective enterprise, resource sharing, teaching and learning, and storytelling and other art forms, empathy increases the strength, stability, and resilience of a society and its members.

Empathy enables us to anticipate the actions and reactions of others and to respond effectively to their ever-changing needs and expectations. At the same time, to empathise is not to merge. Because empathy remains at one remove, it provides a degree of distance in which to make normative judgements about the person or people being empathised with and to weigh up their best interests.

The Limits of Empathy

That said, empathy can also skew our judgement, leading us to violate moral principles to favour the one or the few over the many. It can be distressing or exhausting. Doctors and nurses who are surrounded by human suffering often constrain or regulate their empathetic faculty, not out of callousness or unconcern but to guard against compassion fatigue and burnout.

Yet in less pressured environments, the exercise of empathy is often rewarding and even revitalising. Doctors and nurses who are able to empathise with their patients—though not so much that it prevents them from resting and recuperating—are more likely to feel fulfilled in their work, to say nothing of the benefit to the patients themselves.

Empathy does not grant direct access to another person’s inner world. Rather, it is our best means of approaching that world while respecting its separateness. It allows us to understand without possessing, to care without collapsing distinctions, and to recognise that every human being lives a life that is uniquely their own.

Continue Exploring

If this essay spoke to you, you might look into Heaven and Hell: The Psychology of the Emotions.

You may also enjoy

Explore all Emotions essays

Explore all Relationships essays

By |

The Psychology and Philosophy of Altruism

A proud beggar
Is everything about us selfish and self-interested? Or can we sometimes do the right thing for the right reason?

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Essay substantially revised on 29 August 2026.

Is it possible to do something for another person without, at some level, doing it also for ourselves? Even the most selfless of acts may bring pleasure or pride. If so, can true altruism be said to exist?

Altruism is ordinarily defined as unselfish concern for the welfare of others. Like ‘empathy’, ‘altruism’ is a modern term, coined by the philosopher Auguste Comte (d. 1857) from the French autrui, which itself derives from the Latin alteri (‘other people’).

The classical notion that most nearly approaches altruism is almsgiving, which derives from the Greek eleos (pity) and means ‘to give charity’. In Christian theology, charity is, properly speaking, the love of man for God, and through God, for his fellow men.

Altruism as an Ego Defence

Altruism can be read as an ego defence, a form of sublimation in which we deal with our problems and anxieties by stepping outside ourselves and helping others.

By concentrating on the needs of others, people in altruistic vocations such as medicine, nursing, and teaching may be able to permanently push their own needs into the background, where they can more easily be ignored or forgotten. Conversely, people who care for a young, disabled, or elderly person may experience profound anxiety and distress should this role suddenly be removed from them.

Altruism as a defensive operation ought to be distinguished from true altruism, the one being primarily a means of covering up uncomfortable feelings, the other of achieving some external or impersonal end such as alleviating hunger or poverty. 

Psychological Egoism

However, many psychologists and philosophers have argued that there is, in fact, no such thing as true altruism—a position sometimes referred to as ‘psychological egoism’.

In The Dawn (1881), Nietzsche argues that that which is called ‘pity’ is not selfless but variously self-motivated.

Here, Nietzsche is in effect agreeing with Aristotle, who in the Rhetoric defines pity as a feeling of pain caused by an evil that befalls one who does not deserve it, ‘and that might well befall us or one of our friends, and, moreover, befall us soon.’ In other words, we only pity someone insofar as they are relatable.

In an insightful aside, Aristotle adds that people feel pity for their similars and acquaintances, but not for those for whom they feel as they do for themselves. The pitiful, says Aristotle, should not be confounded with the terrible: Amasis wept at the sight of his friend begging, but not at that of his son being led to death.

The acts that we call altruistic are self-interested, if not because they relieve anxiety, then perhaps because they lead to pleasant feelings of pride and satisfaction; the expectation of honour or reciprocation; or the greater likelihood of a place in heaven; and even if neither of the above, then at least because they relieve painful feelings such as the guilt or shame of not having acted.

Is True Altruism Possible?

This argument has been attacked on various grounds, but most pointedly for its faulty, circular logic: ‘People who perform altruistic acts benefit from those acts. Therefore, altruistic acts are performed for the benefit of the people who perform them.’

The bottom line, I think, is this. There can be no such thing as an ‘altruistic’ act that does not involve some element of self-interest, no such thing, for example, as an altruistic act that does not lead to some degree of pleasure or pride. Therefore, an act should not be written off as selfish or self-motivated simply because it includes some inevitable element of self-interest. The act can still be counted as altruistic if the ‘selfish’ element is accidental; or, if not accidental, then secondary; or, if neither accidental nor secondary, then at least un-determining.

Each year in the UK, around a hundred people donate a kidney to a stranger. These remarkable individuals probably derive considerable satisfaction from having donated a kidney, but it does not follow that they did so in order to obtain that satisfaction.

In short, an act is altruistic if we would have done it anyway, regardless of what it happened to bring us.

Only one question remains: how many of our so-called altruistic acts can meet this criterion for true altruism?

Continue Exploring

If this essay spoke to you, you might look into Hide and Seek: The Psychology of Self-Deception and  Heaven and Hell: The Psychology of the Emotions.

You may also enjoy

Explore all Self-Deception essays

Explore all Emotions essays