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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.

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

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One Man’s Search for Meaning

Man in front of a bleak road
He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how. —Nietzsche & Frankl

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

Viktor Frankl (1905–1997) was an Austrian psychiatrist and neurologist, the founder of logotherapy. His experiences in Nazi concentration camps profoundly shaped his outlook, which found its fullest expression in Man’s Search for Meaning, one of the most influential books of the twentieth century.

Viktor Emil Frankl was born in Vienna in 1905. As a schoolboy, he attended evening lectures in philosophy and psychology. While still in his teens, he sent one of his papers to Sigmund Freud, who arranged to have it published in an international psychoanalytic journal. Frankl later joined Alfred Adler’s rival circle, only to break away after concluding that both Freud and Adler had got it wrong.

Freud argued that we are driven primarily by the pursuit of pleasure. Adler emphasised power, mastery, and the overcoming of inferiority. Frankl proposed a third possibility: meaning.

From 1928 to 1930, Frankl organised counselling programmes for suicidal students, which supported his growing belief that people needed reasons to live as well as reasons not to die. After qualifying in medicine in 1930, he specialised in neurology and psychiatry, treating patients with depression and suicidal thoughts.

The Decision

In 1941, Frankl obtained a visa to emigrate to the United States. Then one evening, he returned home to find his father holding a fragment of marble salvaged from a synagogue that had been destroyed by the Nazis. The fragment bore part of the Fifth Commandment: Honour thy father and thy mother. Frankl chose to remain by his parents in Vienna, tearing up his passage to safety.

The following year, Frankl and his family were deported. His parents, brother, and pregnant wife all perished. On arriving at Auschwitz, the guards confiscated the manuscript that he had been working on for years.

Stripped of his possessions, his profession, and even his name, he found himself wondering what remained of his former self.

He later recalled:

We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms—to choose one’s own attitude in any given set of circumstances—to choose one’s own way.

Frankl’s conclusion echoes that of the Stoics: while our circumstances may be taken from us, our response remains our own. Instead of sinking into despair, Frankl found purpose in imagining the future. He pictured himself lecturing to students about the psychology of the camps, subliming his suffering into knowledge that might help others or illuminate the human condition. He silently reconstructed the manuscript in his mind and, after the war, painstakingly rewrote it from memory.

He also wrote Man’s Search for Meaning, which he drafted in little more than a week. Intended as a brief account of his experiences, it went on to sell many millions of copies.

The ideas he had carried through the camps became the foundation of an entirely new approach to psychotherapy.

The Will to Meaning

Frankl’s message is ultimately one of hope. Even in the most absurd, painful, and dispiriting of circumstances, life can be given meaning—and so too can suffering. Life in the camps confirmed his conviction that our deepest motivation is neither pleasure, as Freud had believed, nor power, as Adler had believed, but meaning. Pleasure and success matter, but they cannot satisfy us for long unless they serve a larger purpose. As Frankl wrote, ‘Happiness cannot be pursued, but must ensue.’

These ideas became the foundation of logotherapy (from the Greek logos, meaning ‘word’, ‘reason’, or ‘principle’), which is often described as the ‘Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy’ for coming after those of Freud and Adler. Part philosophy and part psychotherapy, logotherapy belongs to the existential tradition—but differs from its mainstream in holding that meaning is discovered as well as created.

Logotherapy seeks not merely to relieve symptoms but to help people discover meaning in their lives. According to Frankl, meaning can be found in three principal ways: through creating or contributing something of value; through our relationships, especially the loving ones; and through the attitude we adopt in the face of unavoidable suffering.

Depression and Meaning

Frankl coined the term ‘Sunday neurosis’ to refer to the dejection that many people feel at the end of the working week when they finally have time to realise how empty and meaningless their lives have become. This existential vacuum can lead to all manner of distractions and compensations: anxiety, avoidance, binge eating, drinking, overworking, and overspending. In the short term, these distractions carpet over the existential vacuum, but in the longer term, they prevent action from being taken and meaning from being found.

For Frankl, depression results when the gap between what a person is and what they ought to be, or once wished to be, becomes so large that it can no longer be carpeted over. The person’s goals seem far out of reach and they can no longer envisage a future. As in Psalm 41, abyssus abyssum invocat—’hell brings forth hell,’ or, in an alternative translation, ‘the deep calls unto the deep.’

Thus, depression is our way of telling ourselves that something is seriously wrong and needs working through and changing.

Unless change can be made, there will continue to be a mismatch between our lived experience and our desired experience, between the meaninglessness of everyday life and the innate drive to find meaning, to self-actualise, to be all that we can be.

From an existential standpoint, the experience of depression obliges us to become aware of our mortality and freedom, and challenges us to exercise the latter within the framework of the former.

By meeting this ultimate challenge, we can break out of the cast that has been imposed upon us, discover who we truly are, and, in so doing, begin to give deep meaning to our lives.

After the War

After the war, Frankl returned to Vienna, where he rebuilt both his life and his career. In 1947, he married Eleonore Schwindt, with whom he had a daughter, Gabriele. He became head of neurology at the Vienna Polyclinic Hospital and lectured at universities around the world. He refused to let himself be defined by his wartime experiences. He remained an enthusiastic mountaineer into old age and, in his sixties, fulfilled a lifelong ambition of earning a pilot’s licence.

By the time of his death in 1997, Man’s Search for Meaning had sold millions of copies in dozens of languages. It continues to inspire psychologists, philosophers, doctors, teachers, clergy, and countless ordinary readers searching for purpose amid suffering, loss, and uncertainty. He helped broaden psychology beyond pathology, arguing that resilience depends not merely on optimism or self-esteem but on having a reason to get up in the morning.

His message has become more relevant than ever. Many people today enjoy unprecedented freedom and prosperity, while struggling with loneliness, anxiety, and a pervasive sense of emptiness. Technology offers endless distraction, consumerism endless temptation, and social media endless comparison. Yet none can answer the question that mattered most to Frankl: What is my life for?

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I revisit Frankl in The Meaning of Madness and The Art of Failure: The Anti Self-Help Guide.

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A Psychiatrist and Philosopher Attempts to Explain Sadomasochism

Saint Sebastian: martyrdom or ecstasy? Guido Reni, c. 1615.
Saint Sebastian in Ecstasy, by Guido Reni (c. 1615).

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.

Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto.
I am human, and consider nothing human to be alien to me.
—Terence

Many people think of sadism and masochism merely as perversions. In fact, these tendencies exist on a continuum, and are present, to some degree, in all of us.

Sadomasochism can be defined as the taking of pleasure, often sexual in nature, from the inflicting or suffering of pain, hardship, or humiliation. It can feature as an enhancement to sexual intercourse, or, less commonly, as a substitute or sine qua non.

The infliction of pain or hardship incites pleasure, while the simulation of violence can serve to express and deepen attachment. Indeed, sadomasochistic activities are often instigated at the behest, and for the benefit, of the masochist, who orchestrates the activities through subtle cues.

Consensual sadomasochism should not be confused with simple acts of aggression. While sadomasochists seek out pain in the context of love and sex, they do not do so in other situations, and abhor uninvited aggression or abuse as much as the next person.

Sadomasochistic practices are very diverse, although one study identified four distinct patterns or clusters: hypermasculinity, infliction and reception of pain, physical restriction, and psychological humiliation. Interestingly, the study found that homosexual males tended more to hypermasculinity, whereas heterosexual males tended more to humiliation.

A Brief History of Sadomasochism

‘Sadomasochism’ is a portmanteau of ‘sadism’ and ‘masochism’. In Psychopathia Sexualis (1886), a compendium of sexual case histories and sex-crimes, the psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing, who coined the terms, spoke of basic tendencies to sadism in men, and to masochism in women. Modern surveys indicate that sadistic and masochistic desires are common in both men and women, with, however, sadism being commoner in men and masochism commoner in women.

Krafft-Ebing named ‘sadism’ after the Marquis de Sade, author of Justine, or The Misfortune of Virtue (1791); ‘masochism’ he named after Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, author of Venus in Furs (1870):

Man is the one who desires, woman the one who is desired. This is woman’s entire but decisive advantage. Through man’s passions, nature has given man into woman’s hands, and the woman who does not know how to make him her subject, her slave, her toy, and how to betray him with a smile in the end is not wise.

The terms ‘sadism’ and ‘masochism’ may be of the nineteenth century, but the activities they denote are as old as the rocks. In his Confessions (1782), the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau admits to the pleasure that he derived from childhood beatings, adding that ‘after having ventured to say so much, I can shrink from nothing’. And shrink he did not: ‘To fall at the feet of an imperious mistress, obey her mandates, or implore pardon, were for me the most exquisite enjoyments…’ 

In Apuleius’ The Golden Ass, the only Roman novel to survive complete, Fotis slips into her lover’s bedchamber, produces a whip from beneath her clothes, and invites him to punish her.

The Kama Sutra, which probably dates back to the second century, contains an entire chapter devoted to ‘blows and cries’. ‘Sexual relations,’ according to this Hindu sacred text, ‘can be conceived as a kind of combat… For successful intercourse, a show of cruelty is essential.’

The physician JH Meibom formulated the first theory of masochism in his Treatise on the Use of Flogging in Medicine and Venery (1639). According to Meibom, flogging a man’s back warms the semen in the kidneys, which then flows down into the testicles, leading to sexual arousal. Other early theories of masochism centred upon the warming of the blood, or the benefits of sexual arousal in mitigating physical pain.

Krafft-Ebing never connected sadism and masochism, because he understood them as stemming from different sexual and erotic logics. But in Three Papers on Sexual Theory (1905), Freud observed that sadism and masochism often come together (no pun intended). Finally, in 1913, the psychoanalyst Isidor Sadger married the terms.

Freud understood sadism as a distortion of the aggressive component of the male sexual instinct, and masochism as a form of sadism directed against the self—and a graver ‘aberration’ than simple sadism. He remarked that the tendency to inflict and receive pain during intercourse is ‘the most common and important of all perversions’ and ascribed it (as much else) to arrested or disordered psychosexual development. He paid scant attention to sadomasochism in women, either because he thought of sadism as a problem of men, or because he thought of masochism as the natural inclination of women.

In Studies in the Psychology of Sex, the physician Henry Havelock Ellis argued along similar lines that there is no neat divide between sadism and masochism. By restricting sadism and masochism to the sphere of eroticism, he severed their historical link with abuse and cruelty.

The philosopher Gilles Deleuze pushed back against Freud and Havelock Ellis. In his essay Coldness and Cruelty (1967), he contended that sadomasochism is an artificial term, and that sadism and masochism are in fact separate and distinct phenomena. Deleuze provided fresh accounts of sadism and masochism, which, despite being fluent in French, I struggled to comprehend. His point, I think, is that the sadist seeks a victim, whereas the masochist seeks—and in an important sense creates—a despot. For the sadist, a masochist is not a genuine victim.

Sadomasochism Explained

If the experts agree on anything, it is that sadomasochism is one of the great mysteries of the human condition. Here, I propose a number of explanations, none of which are mutually incompatible.

Most obviously, the sadist may derive pleasure from feelings of power, authority, and control, and from the ‘suffering’ of the masochist.

The sadist may also harbour a conscious or unconscious desire to punish or desecrate the object of sexual attraction (or a stand-in for the object of sexual attraction, or for an original object of sexual attraction) for having aroused his desire and thereby subjugated him, or for having frustrated his desire or aroused his jealousy.

Sadism can also serve as a defence. By objectifying a partner, the sadist does not need to handle his or the partner’s emotional baggage, and is able to discount the sex as next to meaningless: a mere act of lust rather than an intimate, vulnerable, and pregnant act of love. The partner becomes a trophy, a mere plaything, and while one can own a toy and knock it about, one cannot fall in love with it or be hurt or betrayed by it.

In some cases, sadism might also represent a species of displacement, in which uncomfortable feelings such as anger, shame, and guilt are discharged onto a third party, who serves as a scapegoat.

For the masochist, taking on a role of subjugation and helplessness can offer a release from stress or the burden of responsibility or guilt. It can also evoke infantile feelings of vulnerability and dependency, which can serve as a proxy for trust and intimacy. Moreover, the masochist may derive gratification from earning the approval of the sadist, fulfilling his fantasies, commanding his undivided attention, and, in that sense, controlling him.

For both the sadist and the masochist, sadistic or masochistic desires may arise through conditioning, if domination or submission becomes associated with sexual arousal.

For the couple as a unit, sadomasochism can be seen as a means of intensifying normal sexual relations (pain releases endorphins and other hormones), leaving a mark or memory, testing boundaries, rebelling against social norms and expectations, giving form and expression to psychological realities, building trust and intimacy, or simply playing.

Sadomasochism in Ordinary Life

And what about you, dear reader? It’s easy to think that this sort of stuff only applies to a handful of ‘deviants’, but the truth is that we all harbour sadomasochistic tendencies. Just think, for example, of casual, ‘normal’ behaviours such as love-biting, tickling, or teasing.

Sadomasochism can also play out on a psychological level. In every relationship or almost, one partner is more attached or dependent than the other. Characteristically, the more attached partner is ‘the one who waits’.

Thus, the philosopher Roland Barthes (d. 1980):

Am I in love? —yes, since I am waiting. The other one never waits. Sometimes I want to play the part of the one who doesn’t wait; I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late; but I always lose at this game. Whatever I do, I find myself there, with nothing to do, punctual, even ahead of time. The lover’s fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits. (L’identité fatale de l’amoureux n’est rien d’autre que: je suis celui qui attend.)

The likely outcome of this asymmetry of desire is that the less attached partner (A) becomes dominant, while the more attached partner (B) becomes submissive in a bid to please and seduce. Sooner or later, A feels stifled and takes distance, but if he or she ventures too far, B may threaten to go cold or give up. This in turn prompts A to flip and, for a time, to become the more enthusiastic of the pair. But the original dynamic soon re-establishes itself, until it is once again upset, and so on ad vitam æternam.

Domination and submission are elements of every relationship or almost, but that does not mean that they are not tedious, sterile, and, to echo Freud, immature. Instead of playing at cat and mouse, lovers need to be able to rise above that game, and not just by getting married. By learning to trust each other, they can dare to see each other as the fully-fledged human beings that they truly are, ends-in-themselves rather than mere means-to-an-end.

True love is about respecting, nurturing, and enabling—whatever else may happen on a Sunday—but how many people have the capacity and maturity for this kind of love?

And, of course, it takes two not to tango.

Continue Exploring

If this essay spoke to you, you might look into For Better For Worse, an unconventional exploration of romantic love, marriage, and lasting relationships. For a broader exploration of love, desire, jealousy, and the emotions that shape our lives, see Heaven and Hell: The Psychology of the Emotions.

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