[This draft will be completed after entire self-deception lesson is done]

Intro to Self-Deception

Bending Reality

Nature enhances our existence with built-in anesthetics to quiet our physical and emotional pain. Everyone is capable of bending reality to fit some psychological need without thinking about it. Nature has its reasons for letting us fool our mind or body. Sometimes the purpose is:

• to numb an emotional distress (e.g. denial, delusion)
• sometimes to expand joy (e.g. “blinded by love”)
• to blunt physical pain (e.g. endorphins) or
• to enhance physical performance (adrenaline, serotonin).

One cost of this anesthetic is its tendency to numb out some desirable reality along with the unwanted pain. Another cost is that the psychological numbing — the comforting self-deception — can become addictive. Little daily delusions and ordinary denials can do such a good job of easing discomfort that they may become a habit that steals too much reality. The habit can creep up unnoticed until it becomes conspicuous and costly.

A Well Written Self-Deceptive Character That Touched a Generation

Tennessee Williams’ tragic character, Blanche Dubois, has become a vivid emblem of self-deception. Her use of the primitive defense of denial makes a good demonstration for this lesson. Her maintenance of sanity is achieved by simply refusing to live with the memory of something that has happened.

Denying a sordid past to believe herself a chaste, aristocratic, Southern belle, Blanche’s life is filled with delicate pretension. This make-believe life brings relief from these disturbing memories of promiscuity in a fleabag hotel, a squandered inheritance, a husband who killed himself, even the sex with a teenage student that ruined her career. When her aristocratic illusion is swept aside by her antagonist to reveal the unbearable past, her defense against mental illness is also swept aside. Her conversations become so deluded that everyone knows she is losing reality.

A doctor from the insane asylum with a straightjacket comes to take her. Feeling panic, she resists, but the gentle old man puts aside the jacket and respectfully asks for permission to approach her, offering her his arm as if to a lady. She calms and reenters the make-believe life, gratefully taking his arm and uttering that indelible sentence, “Whoever you are, I have always depended upon the kindness of strangers.”

Tennessee Williams’ beloved sister was intensely delusional and obviously provided an authentic psychological model of self-deception. His intimacy with the dynamics of delusion probably gave Blanche her utterly believable emotions. Blanche Dubois is one of the theatre's great characters because her striving touches on our universal urge to be better than we are.

Blanche, and other great self-deceptive characters, help us dwell on the ways we fool ourselves to dilute psychological discomfort (ranging from feeling uneasy about our life to the pain of self-contempt). If you take a large perspective on nature's devices for reducing human pain, it becomes clear that we possess a narcotic-like physical painkiller in the endorphins, and a set of emotional painkillers in delusions, denials and any automatic eraser of unwanted or unbearable realities. That perspective allows the view that some self-deception is an essential aspect of existence — and essential to any fully formed fictional character.

This assertion that some self-deception about who we are and how we impact others is normal makes sense to most people — after thinking about it. But others will think the idea farfetched and claim there's very little or no distortion in their own view of reality. About 15% of my U.C. Berkeley undergrads said they were almost always accurate about their educational and career predictions, their initial judgments of people, their predictions of political outcomes, and more.

The rest of these 400 students (being tested for jobs as companions to troubled 5th and 6th grade kids) saw themselves capable of bending reality especially about career, romance, politics, religion, self-image, predicting others' honesty, and so on. If these students are even roughly representative of the typical audience for movies and novels, it suggests many people will identify with a convincingly written self-deceiving protagonist or villian. [I don't understand. If most people don't think they're self-deceptive why will they identify with a self-deceptive character?--df]

This lesson will explore how minor and major self-deceptions can shape our inner life and social life. We hope to demonstrate that minor delusions sometimes enhance the quality of life, instead of just complicating it. Finally, we show suggestive evidence that those people who see themselves as perfectly rational beings may be more prone to struggle with mental health problems and have less success connectly closely with others.

Our lesson starts with those ubiquitous little “delusions” that can be a healthy source of happiness, or an unhealthy source of misery. Then we address the daily denials, which are deceptive disbeliefs similar to delusions. Finally, we look at the more disturbed delusions of mental illness (schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and narcissism). The lesson ends with some light experiential learning that can make self-deception an obviously integral part of being human.

Psychological scholars struggle with the idea of delusion because at bottom it is an internal, hidden belief in a particular view of reality. Most of us with minor delusions eventually gain the insight that, yes, we do bend reality, distort some truth, or were “blinded” by our emotions.