April Fool’s Day is a traditional April 1 joke. But we must explain to children that this tradition ends on the 2nd and to adults that lying is a small deviance, even a bad habit that can become a real disease.
The “April Fools” make adults laugh and give children the opportunity to hang a few coloring pages behind their parents’ backs. This custom, the origin of which is not well known, and which probably originated in the Middle Ages, also exists abroad. If there is no reason to fear drifts today, in some families or groups of friends, the pretext of “April Fools” is used to assert the truths. However, the label of “charming game” should not be allowed to lie!
Lying has taken an important place in our societies. The child is willingly a liar, without anyone having taught him. For him, this is a defense mechanism, a negation of a reality that bothers him. In our policies for example, the lie seems to intensify: the reality is not so easy to assume and to generalize the lie makes it a very practical trivialization. But remember that the basis of community life presupposes that the other is telling the truth. Is it okay to lie, or does it mean that something is wrong with a person? Normality or deviance of the brain? It depends on the type of lie, as there are four categories of liars.
1. Mythomaniacs
The first category, which unmistakably concerns medicine, is mythomania. With a nuance: as often in popular language, medical terms are diverted and the “mytho” becomes a “spiel” or a “dreamer”. These signs are far from the reality of mythomania, a real disease causing a lot of suffering. The mythomaniac feels an imperious need to lie, because there he finds a solution to respond to the contempt he feels for himself. It is an “abjection of conscience”, as Boris Cyrulnick puts it so nicely.
2. The “cynical and utilitarian” liar
The “cynical or utilitarian” liar is the most “common”, the one one meets most often. We no longer talk about illness. Lying is used to abuse and manipulate. But between two lies, this liar calms down, while the mythomaniac lies all the time, for the simple pleasure of attracting attention.
3. Denial
There is a third category, also a disease: “denial”, which could be defined as the refusal to take charge of certain realities. You know for example the “denial of pregnancy”, these women who give birth without knowing that they were pregnant.
4. The acceptable false truth
Finally, medicine cannot approach the chapter of lying without evoking a fourth and final category which concerns it and which doctors modestly call “the acceptable false truth”: for example, the fact of lying to his patient so as not to do so. of the penalty… A debate which, contrary to what many doctors say, is far from settled. Lying to relieve. Everyone will appreciate its usefulness. And if possible notify his doctor!
Liars never self-cure
Liars never tell their doctors about it, even big mythomaniacs. They do not consult spontaneously. This always happens in the context of forensic expertise.
But it’s hard to tell the difference between the “mytho” – permanent liar victim of an illness – and the occasional liar – a cynical personality – for whom treatment will be useless. However, it is important to differentiate between these two profiles because justice excuses the mytho, but condemns the other. This requires a long and careful psychiatric examination. But, on the other hand, at the end there is a treatment for the mytho.
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