A Psychiatrist’s Three-Step Test for Self-Deception
Can you trust what you see?
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Some time after the publication of Hide and Seek, I received a letter from a reader, asking:
Are common, ordinary things like seeing the bright side, a silver lining, or an opportunity in misfortune just feeble rationalisations to help us live in a comfortable illusion? Your example about ‘sweet lemons’, a rejected love interest explained away as a blessing in disguise doesn’t feel to me as an illusory or self-deceptive belief. If a cancer patient is glad that they can respect life more fully after getting sick, surely they’re not just dwelling in self-deception and rationalising away things, clinging to some mistaken belief.
Could you clear things up a little about the murky world of self-deception? It’s true that someone rejected for a job opening might say that they’re ‘keeping doors open’, that they got ‘life experience’ or that setbacks are a part of life, and this would allow them to feel better, but I’ve never considered this to be some sort of self-deception.
I replied:
That’s a very good question. How do we know when we’re deceiving ourselves, rather than learning or growing from our experiences, or just making the best out of a bad situation? By its very nature, self-deception is hard to distinguish from the truth—whether our internal, emotional truth, or the external, objective truth.
That a belief comforts us does not make it false; that it pains us does not make it true. What matters is whether we arrived at the belief because it fits the facts, or because we need the facts to fit the belief.
To establish the direction of fit between your beliefs and the world, here are three tests you can apply.
1. Feel It
First, trust your intuition, and ask yourself: ‘What does it feel like to react in the way that I’m reacting?’ Does it feel calm, considered, and nuanced, or shallow and knee-jerk? Am I taking the welfare of others into consideration, or is it just all about me? Am I satisfied with, even proud of, my self-conquering effort, or am I left feeling small, anxious, and a little ashamed?
2. Test It
Try to falsify the belief—that is, to prove yourself wrong. Self-deception doesn’t ‘add up’ in the grand scheme and can often be brought down by even superficial questioning. As with a jigsaw, try to look at the bigger picture of your life and see how the belief or reaction might fit in. Did you react from a position of strength or vulnerability? What would the person you most respect think? What would Socrates think? Ask others for their opinion. If they challenge or disagree with you, does that make you feel angry, upset, or defensive? The nature of your reaction and its congruity can speak volumes about the character of your motives.
3. Project It
Finally, project the belief into the future and consider where it is likely to lead. Truth is constructive and adaptive, whereas lies are destructive or self-defeating. So how useful is the thought or reaction going to be for you? Are you just covering up an irrational fear to get by, or creating a solid foundation for the future? Are you empowering yourself to fulfil your highest potential, or depriving yourself of opportunities for growth and creating further problems down the line?
Is the cycle simply going to repeat itself, or will the truth, at last, make you free?
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
The ego defence of displacement plays an important part in scapegoating, in which uncomfortable feelings such as anger, frustration, envy, guilt, shame, and insecurity are displaced or redirected onto another, often more vulnerable, person or group.
The scapegoats—often outsiders, immigrants, minorities, ‘deviants’, or other vulnerable groups—are then persecuted, enabling the scapegoaters to discharge and distract from their uncomfortable feelings, which are replaced or overtaken by a crude but consoling sense of affirmation and self-righteous indignation. The creation of a villain necessarily implies that of a hero, even if both are purely fictional.
Sometimes it is the villain, or villains, who are in need of an even greater villain. Especially in a time of crisis, unscrupulous leaders and politicians can cynically exploit the ancient and deep-rooted impulse to scapegoat to deflect and distract from their own inadequacies and evade, or seek to evade, their burden of blame and responsibility.
The Ideal Scapegoat
An ideal scapegoat, whether a person or group, is sufficiently different to be blamed, sufficiently conspicuous to be noticed, and sufficiently vulnerable to be attacked.
A historical example of a scapegoat is Marie Antoinette, queen of Louis XVI of France, whom the people called l’Autre-chienne—a pun playing on Autrichienne [Austrian woman] and autre chienne [other bitch]—and accused of being profligate and promiscuous. When the 14-year-old Marie Antoinette arrived in France to marry the then heir to the throne, the country had already been near-bankrupted by the reckless spending of Louis XV, and the naïve foreign princess soon became the unwitting target of the people’s mounting ire.
A scapegoat, such as Marie Antoinette, need not be entirely innocent. Indeed, some impression of guilt may make for a better scapegoat, providing a hook on which to hang greater grievances.
A scapegoat is often a person or group, but can also be an object, animal, or spirit. In fact, even human scapegoats are no longer regarded as fully human but are to varying degrees dehumanised and objectified. Some, such as witches and midwives in mediaeval Europe, are quite literally demonised. The dehumanisation of the scapegoat—which might, in the process, be transformed into a sacred or ritual object—makes the scapegoating both more potent and more palatable, and can even lend it a sense of pre-ordained, cosmic inevitability.
The Madness of the Crowds
According to the philosopher René Girard (d. 2015), owing to our crooked nature, envy gradually builds up in a society until it reaches a tipping point, at which order and reason cede to mob rule, chaos, and violence. To quell this ‘madness of the crowds’ which poses an existential threat to the society, an exposed or vulnerable person or group is singled out as a sink for all the bad feeling, and the bad feeling bred from the bad feeling. The scapegoat does not merely absorb aggression, but unites the aggressors and reduces their diffuse problems to a single, visible face.
After the defeat of the Thirty Tyrants of Athens in 403 BCE, Socrates, with his close links to prominent oligarchs such as Critias, who had been the first and worst among the Thirty, no longer seemed like the harmless eccentric of old, but like a dangerous and corrupting influence, a breeder of tyrants and the enemy of the common man. In the febrile atmosphere that had taken hold over the city, any accusation made against him, however false or fanciful, could be seized upon as a pretext to punish him and scapegoat him for the sufferings of the tyranny. The trial and death of Socrates, as related in Plato’s Apology, Crito, and Phaedo, still makes for compelling reading.
Once he is no more, a scapegoat may be totemised—and all the more so if he is also a martyr, that is, one who opposes or resists a belief or system of beliefs that is being imposed upon him. Today, Socrates is chiefly remembered by his death, with the Stoic Seneca going so far as to opine that ‘it was the hemlock that made Socrates great’ (cicuta magnum Socratem fecit). Socrates himself seems to have anticipated his totemisation, which is one reason he accepted the death sentence even though he could have avoided it, or later escaped. In Plato’s Apology, he seems almost to court death.
The Ultimate Scapegoat
The term ‘scapegoat’ is rooted in the Old Testament, more specifically, in Chapter 16 of the Book of Leviticus, according to which God instructed Moses and Aaron to sacrifice two goats every year. The first goat was to be sacrificed and its blood sprinkled upon the Ark of the Covenant. The High Priest was then to lay his hands upon the head of the second goat and confess the sins of the people. Unlike the first goat, this second goat was not to be killed but released into the wilderness together with its burden of sin, which is why it came to be known as a, or the, scapegoat.
The altar that stands in the sanctuary of every church is a symbolic remnant and reminder of this sacrificial practice, with the ultimate object of sacrifice being, of course, Jesus himself. Upon seeing Jesus for the first time, John the Baptist is said to have exclaimed, ‘Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world!’ (John 1:29). In Christian iconography, Christ is often depicted as the victorious Lamb of God of the Book of Revelation, with one leg hooked around a banner with a red cross—whence the name of one of Oxford’s most famous public houses, the Lamb & Flag.
The sacrifice prescribed in the Book of Leviticus prefigures that of Jesus, who played the role of the first goat in his human crucifixion, and the role of the second goat, the scapegoat, in his divine resurrection.
Scapegoating is so ingrained in our nature that we scapegoated God himself.
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:
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?
Whatever is done for love always occurs beyond good and evil. – Nietzsche
Splitting is a very common ego defense mechanism; it can be defined as the division or polarization of beliefs, actions, objects, or persons into good and bad by focusing selectively on their positive or negative attributes. This is often seen in politics, for example, when members of the Labour Party portray members of the Conservative Party as narrow-minded and self-interested, and conversely when members of the Conservative Party caricature members of the Labour Party as self-righteous hypocrites. Other examples of splitting are the deeply religious person who thinks of others as being either blessed or damned, the child of divorced parents who idolises one parent and shuns the other, and the hospital in-patient who sees the doctors as helpful and dedicated and the nurses as lazy and incompetent. An example of splitting in literature can be found in JD Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. The main protagonist, Holden Caulfield, is mystified by adulthood. To help cope with his fear of becoming an adult, he thinks of adulthood as a world of entirely bad things such as superficiality and hypocrisy (‘phoniness’) and of childhood as a world of entirely good things such as innocence, curiosity, and honesty. He tells his younger sister Phoebe that he imagines childhood as an idyllic field of rye in which children romp and play, and himself as the ‘catcher in the rye’ who stands on the edge of a cliff, catching the children as they threaten to fall over (and presumably die/become adults).
Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around – nobody big, I mean – except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff – I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be.
In contrast to JD Salinger, Miguel de Cervantes uses splitting to great comical effect as his main protagonist, the self-styled Don Quixote de la Mancha, guides us through a world that he has repopulated with heroes and villains, princesses and harlots, giants and dwarves – with the heroes being the greatest, the villains the most cruel, the ladies the fairest and most virtuous, and so on. ‘Take care, your worship,’ cries Sancho Pancha, Don Quixote’s peasant-turned-squire, ‘those things over there are not giants but windmills.’ Splitting diffuses the anxiety that arises from our inability to grasp the nuances and complexities of a given situation or state of affairs by simplifying and schematising the situation and thereby making it easier to think about; it also reinforces our sense of self as good and virtuous by effectively demonizing all those who do not share in our opinions and values. On the other hand, such a compartmentalization of opposites leaves us with a distinctly distorted picture of reality and a restricted range of thoughts and emotions; it also affects our ability to attract and maintain relationships, not only because it is tedious and unbecoming, but also because it can easily flip, with friends and lovers being thought of as personified virtue at one time and then as personified vice at another (and back and forth). Splitting also arises in groups, when members of the in-group are seen to have mostly positive attributes, whereas members of out-groups are seen to have mostly negative attributes – a phenomenon that contributes to groupthink. Finally, it is worth noting that both fairy tales and the Church feature a number of sharp splits, for example, heroes and villains, good and evil, heaven and hell, angels and demons, and saints and sinners; and that the greatest characters of literature, such as the Achilles or the Odysseus of Homer and the Anthony or the Cleopatra of Shakespeare, contain large measures of both good and bad, with the one being intimately related to the other.
The deepest truths often emerge where disciplines meet. About →
You must be logged in to post a comment.