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 |

Diogenes the Cynic and the Philosophy of the Dog

Alexander the Great before Diogenes the Cynic
Alexander the Great bows before Diogenes the Cynic.

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 18 August 2026.

Plato is said to have called Diogenes the Cynic ‘a Socrates gone mad’. It is easy to see why. Diogenes lived in a storage jar, begged for his food, masturbated in public, mocked Plato to his face, and told Alexander the Great to get out of his sunshine.

But there was a philosophy behind the madness. Diogenes did not merely question the conventions by which people lived. He attempted to strip them away altogether—and to live out the consequences.

Exiled to Athens

Diogenes (c. 412–323 BCE) was born in Sinope, a Greek colony on the Black Sea coast of modern-day Turkey. After being exiled for having defaced the city’s coinage, he moved to Athens, took up the life of a beggar, and made it his mission to metaphorically deface the coinage of custom and convention—which, he maintained, was the false currency of morality.

The story about defacing coinage may have been no more than a play on words, since, in Greek, the word for ‘money’, nomisma, sounds like, and is derived from, the word for ‘custom’, nomos. However, archaeologists have unearthed defaced mid-fourth-century coins from Sinope, making the literal story harder to dismiss.

In Athens, Diogenes attached himself to Antisthenes, a follower of Socrates who taught that virtue, rather than wealth or pleasure, is sufficient for happiness. According to tradition, Antisthenes initially tried to drive him away, even threatening him with his staff. Like all the best students, Diogenes simply refused to leave.

If Socrates had shown that a good life required examining our assumptions, Diogenes went further. He asked what might happen if, having examined our assumptions, we outright discarded them.

The Philosophy of the Dog

Diogenes disdained the need for conventional shelter and other corrupting ‘dainties’ and chose instead to sleep in a large storage jar and get by on a diet of chickpeas, lupins, and assorted vegetables. He used to beg for the bare necessities, including from statues—explaining to passers-by that he was thereby practising for rejection.

According to another famous story, he possessed a wooden cup until he saw a boy drinking water from his cupped hands. ‘A child has bested me in simplicity,’ he exclaimed, throwing away his cup.

Diogenes held that human beings had much to learn from the artlessness of dogs, which, unlike us, had not ‘complicated every simple gift of the gods’. The term ‘Cynic’ derives from the Greek for ‘dog-like’, kynikos—or perhaps from Antisthenes’ association with the Cynosarges, a gymnasium near the Temple of Herakles for the use of Athenians born of foreign mothers.

He placed nature and reason firmly above custom and convention, which he held to be incompatible with happiness. It is natural for human beings to act in accordance with reason, and reason dictates that human beings ought to live in accordance with nature. Instead of wasting our substance in the pursuit of wealth or renown, we ought to have the sense and courage to live like animals or gods, revelling in life’s simplest pleasures, which are also its greatest, without bond or fear.

When people called him a dog, he took this as a badge of pride—for the less he needed from the world, the less the world could take from him.

The Philosophy of Shamelessness

His freedom extended even to shame. Diogenes taught that, if an act is not shameful in private, it should not become shameful merely because it is performed in public. Convention had taught people to be ashamed of things that were natural while remaining remarkably unashamed of vices such as greed and vanity.

Thus, upon being challenged for masturbating in the marketplace, in full view of everyone, he replied, ‘If only it were so easy to soothe hunger by rubbing an empty belly.’

This was not simple exhibitionism, but an extreme form of philosophical training, or askesis. Like later Cynics, Diogenes deliberately exposed himself to discomfort, rejection, ridicule, heat, cold, and hunger to strengthen himself against them. 

In the deep winter, he would strip naked and embrace bronze statues. One day, upon seeing this, a Spartan asked him whether he was cold. When he said that he was not, the Spartan replied, ‘Well, then, what’s so impressive about what you’re doing?’ A contempt for comfort is one of the many things that the Spartans and the Cynics held in common.

Diogenes vs Plato

Although he privileged reason, Diogenes despised abstract philosophy of the kind practised at Plato’s Academy.

When, to great acclaim, Plato defined a human being as ‘an animal, biped, and featherless’, Diogenes plucked a fowl and brought it to the Academy with the words, ‘Behold! I have brought you Plato’s man.’ Plato consequently refined his definition, adding ‘with broad nails’—even though he would probably have known of monkeys, and perhaps even seen one.

One day, Diogenes asked Plato for a handful of figs from his garden. When Plato had a whole bushel sent out, he muttered, ‘Typical Plato.’

Like Socrates, Diogenes favoured living dialogue over the dead word. When a certain Hegesias asked to borrow one of his writing tablets, he replied, ‘You are a simpleton, Hegesias; you do not choose painted figs, but real ones; and yet you pass over the true training and would apply yourself to written rules.’

For Diogenes, philosophy was not something you read or wrote about. It wasn’t even something you believed in. It was something that you courageously enacted and lived out.

Diogenes’ greatest argument was not a tome like Plato’s Republic, but himself, the life that he led. The jar, the begging, the public masturbation were demonstrations designed to expose the absurdity of blind convention. Whereas Socrates had questioned people, Diogenes interrogated life itself.

Looking for a Human Being

Diogenes was not easily impressed by his fellow men and women.

He used to stroll around Athens in broad daylight brandishing an ignited lamp. Whenever curious people stopped to ask what he was doing, he would reply, ‘I am looking for a human being.’ It was a case of a dog searching for a supposedly rational being—and finding one only in himself.

On other occasions, Diogenes would walk backwards through the streets or enter the theatre against the flow of people leaving. When a large enough crowd had gathered to laugh at him, he would turn on them: ‘Why do you mock, when you’ve spent your whole life walking backwards? I, at least, am able to turn around.’

Nietzsche’s parable of the madman in The Gay Science is almost certainly inspired by Diogenes. In both cases, the madman carries a lamp in broad daylight and is laughed at by the crowd—but it is, of course, the madman who has the last laugh.

Diogenes and Alexander

The most famous encounter in the history of Cynicism, though it may be apocryphal, perfectly captures Diogenes. Alexander the Great came to visit him one morning while he was basking in the sun. The most powerful man in the Greek world, and soon the entire known world (oikoumenē, ‘the inhabited earth’), stood before the bedraggled philosopher and asked whether there was anything he might do for him.

‘Yes,’ replied Diogenes. ‘Stand out of my sunshine.’

According to the story, Alexander was so impressed that he declared, ‘If I were not Alexander, I should wish to be Diogenes.’

Diogenes, for his part, would never have wished to be Alexander.

Citizen of the World

Diogenes’ rejection of convention extended beyond wealth, status, and respectability to political identity itself.

Asked where he came from, he reportedly answered, kosmopolitēs—‘a citizen of the world’—thereby coining the Greek word that became our ‘cosmopolitan’.

This would sound radical in some parts of modern-day Britain or America, let alone in a Greek world organised around city-states, in which citizenship determined a person’s identity, loyalties, rights, and obligations. Diogenes had been driven out of his own city, and sublimed his exile into universal citizenship.

Diogenes influenced Crates of Thebes, a wealthy man who abandoned his fortune to become a Cynic. Crates in turn taught Zeno of Citium, who went on to found Zenonism—better known as Stoicism. The Cynic ideal of living according to nature, freedom from external goods, and cosmopolitanism thus passed, in modified form, into one of the most influential movements of the ancient world. The inheritance of the man who inhabited a jar lived on in the emperor Marcus Aurelius, whose Meditations remain, today more than ever, a bestseller.

A Socrates Gone Mad?

Diogenes eventually settled in Corinth, where he died in 323 BCE—the same year as Alexander the Great in Babylon.

Asked how he wished to be buried, he replied that his body should simply be thrown outside the city wall. When his friends protested that wild animals would devour it, he told them to leave him a stick to drive them away. ‘But you will be dead,’ they objected. ‘Then what harm can the animals do me?’

After his death, the Corinthians honoured him with a pillar surmounted by a dog of Parian marble.

Plato’s alleged description of Diogenes as ‘a Socrates gone mad’ captured something real. Like Socrates, Diogenes challenged received opinion, cared little for wealth or status, practised philosophy in public, and believed that the state of one’s soul mattered more than conventional success. But Diogenes removed almost every restraint that remained in Socrates. He turned philosophical independence into homelessness, Socratic questioning into public theatre, simplicity into radical poverty, and indifference to opinion into shamelessness.

Did he take philosophy too far? I often think that, had I lived in a warmer climate, I too might have had the courage of a Diogenes.

Continue Exploring

If this essay spoke to you, you might look into Stoic Stories.

You may also enjoy

Explore all Stoicism essays

Explore all Success & Failure essays