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June 20, 2006
The principal difference between lying and denial is that in the case of the former, the self is not epistemically divided against itself; the liar is fully conscious of the contradiction between what is and what is said. In denial, the self is divided such that what is unconsciously known to be true is precisely unavailable to the conscious subject who avers something untrue.
Freud understood the phenomenon of denial as a matter of self-deception. His theory of repression is pivotal in explaining this self-deception with the therapy consisting in bringing of repressed content to consciousness. It is a reworking of the Socratic conception of self-knowledge; one of a self divided against itself that progressively frees itself from its distorted self-conceptions in a journey of self-actualization.
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The problem with the classical Freudian conception of denegation/repression is its assumption that there is or can be an already self-present truth that is "split off" and "held" in memory. Memory is a "system property", a continuously reconstituted medium, and whatever aspects of the self, in its constitutive doubleness or duplicity, (which is also the "hinge" of its relatedness to others, its sociality), are split off and denied not only are fragmentary and partial, such that there can be no reference to something clearly or veridically "external", but are necessarily reconstituted/reintegrated into the "same" duplicity of self. Correspondingly, any "self-actualization" or "growth" would occur through the recognition of the limitedness (and loss) of the self in the distortions of its relations to others. This renders any notion of "the unconscious" and its repression as causally determinative, (rather than, say, previously conditioned beyond awareness), doubtful and suggests the fatal pitfalls of the dogmatism of psychoanalytic interpretations and the supposed detachment/"authority" of the analyst.