Why We Lie: The Source of our Disasters. Dorothy Rowe

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СКАЧАТЬ to sleep, we can elaborate our tactics for deceiving our parents. However, some children are born to parents who decide that they will appear to their children to agree in their views about everything. Not being offered alternative interpretations of events, the child believes that his parents see everything exactly as it is, and are therefore not susceptible to being deceived.

      In his biography of his father Philip Gosse, Edmund Gosse described how he had seen his parents in this way, and what a shock it was to him when he discovered that his father could be in error. Philip Gosse was a colleague of Charles Darwin, a painstaking biologist, and a devout Plymouth Brethren, as was his wife. Edmund Gosse wrote,

      In consequence of hearing so much about an Omniscient God, a being of supernatural wisdom and penetration who was always with us, who made, in fact, a fourth in our company, I had come to think of Him, not without awe, but with absolute confidence. My Father and Mother, in their serene discipline of me, never argued with one another, never differed; their wills seemed absolutely as one. My Mother always deferred to my Father, and in his absence spoke of him to me, as if he were all-wise. I confused him in some sense with God; in all events I believed that my Father knew everything and saw everything. One morning in my sixth year, my Mother and I were alone in the morning room, when my Father came in and announced some fact to us… I remember turning quickly, in embarrassment, and looking into the fire. The shock was to me as a thunderbolt, for what my Father had said was not true. My Mother and I, who had been present at the trifling incident, were aware that it had not happened exactly as it had been reported to him. My Mother gently told him so, and he accepted the correction. Nothing could have possibly been more trifling to my parents, but to me it was an epoch. Here was an appalling discovery, never suspected before, that my Father was not as God, and did not know everything. The shock was not caused by any suspicion that he was not telling the truth, as it appeared to him, but by the awful proof that he was not, as I had supposed, omniscient.⁸

      Not long after this incident, Edmund chanced upon some tools which workmen had left in the garden near a small rockery built by his father with what Edmund described as ‘a pretty parasol of water’. Edmund wondered whether one of these tools could make a hole in the base of the water pipe to the little fountain. He made the hole, and moved on, thinking about other things. Several days later his father came in to dinner very angry. He turned on the tap to the fountain, and water rushed through the hole. The rockery was ruined. Edmund was ‘frozen with alarm’ and waiting to be blamed. However, his mother pointed out that the plumbers had probably caused the damage, and his father agreed. Edmund was ‘turned to stone within, but outwardly sympathetic and with unchecked appetite’. He wrote,

      The emotions which now thronged within me, and led me with an almost unwise alacrity to seek solitude in the back garden, were not moral at all, they were intellectual. I was not ashamed of having successfully – and so surprisingly – deceived my parents by my crafty silence; I looked upon that as a providential escape, and dismissed all further thought of it. I had other things to think of.

      In the first place, the theory that my Father was omniscient or infallible was now dead and buried. He probably knew very little; in this case he had not known a fact of such importance that if you did not know that, it could hardly matter what you knew. My Father, as a deity, as a natural force of immense prestige, fell in my eyes to a human level. In future, his statements about things in general need not be accepted implicitly. But of all the thoughts that rushed upon my savage and undeveloped little brain at this crisis, the most curious was that I had found a companion and confidant in myself. There was a secret in this world and it belonged to me and to somebody who lived in the same body with me. There were two of us, and we could talk to one another. It is difficult to define impressions so rudimentary, but it is certain that it was in this dual form that the sense of my individuality now suddenly descended on me, and it is equally certain that it was a great solace to me to find a sympathizer in my own breast.⁹

      The events in childhood that come to define who we are often are events that in themselves are insignificant. What is of immense importance are the conclusions we draw from these experiences. In this successful deception of his parents, Edmund was made aware of both his sense of being a person and the lifelong dialogue between himself and his closest ally, himself. He learned that he could separate himself from what was going on around him. He could take up the position of being an observer, and discuss his observations with himself.

      Edmund, an only child, spent considerable time entertaining himself, and so he could conduct long conversations with himself. His parents made it very clear to him that they wanted him to be a godly child, and he tried to conform outwardly to their wishes. However, he knew that he was not a godly child, and he never pretended to himself that he was. Because his parents never inflicted physical punishments, he was not placed in situations where he had to take a stand against their attacks on his sense of being a person. He did not have to defy his parents the way that beaten children do, by claiming that the parents’ assaults did not hurt. He was a loving, respectful son who, somehow, never became the holy person his father wanted. Instead, he became the truthful writer that he wanted to be.

      Edmund Gosse’s story stands in stark contrast to the work of Paul Newton who studied the lies told by two- and three-year-old children. These children told a wide variety of lies, but there were no white lies. The children knew a good deal about the adults closest to them, but they had not yet perceived that some people wanted to be protected from the truth.

      Many of these children told bravado lies. All bravado lies are aimed at bolstering the sense of being a person when it is under attack. We all resort to, ‘No, I wasn’t frightened’, or, ‘No, I wasn’t upset’, rather than admit weakness. However, it is children, more than adults, who receive physical punishment.

      ‘It didn’t hurt’ is a lie commonly associated with school-age children, but in Newton’s study Reddy recorded that ‘there were some heart-rending reports of “Don’t hurt” bravado’. She quoted one report concerned with a little girl of three years six months. The mother of the child said,

      You can smack her legs until they’re red raw, and if she’s in one of her wilful moods she’ll go: ‘Didn’t hurt!’ On a couple of occasions when she’s been threatened with a good hiding for misbehaviour she’s even dropped her trousers for you. The other day she did this and then said, ‘It dudn’t hurt!’¹⁰

      All parents of small children sometimes administer a punishment of some kind far greater than the misdemeanour warranted. Some of these parents, when they calm down, realize that they have overstepped the mark and regret it. Wise parents acknowledge this to the child, and apologize without blaming the child for forcing them to go to such an extreme. Clearly this mother felt she was justified in inflicting such pain on her child. It seems that she preferred her child to fear and obey her than to love her. Did she not know that fear drives out love? Even if we manage to retain some love for the person we fear, our fear and guilt prevent us from expressing fully and openly the love that we feel.

      With this mother and child, the daughter will always fear her mother because her mother has threatened her with the greatest peril, that of being damaged or broken by such a close encounter with being annihilated as a person.

      This little girl would not then, and perhaps never will, be able to take that step back so she could see and describe what exactly happened to her during those beatings. The Hungarian writer Imre Kertész was older than she was when he, just fifteen, was sent to Auschwitz. Years later he wrote a fictionalized memoir of his time in Auschwitz. He called the central character Gyuri.

      One of the most onerous tasks inflicted on the prisoners was the loading of bags of cement. When Gyuri dropped a bag which then split open and spilled its contents, the guard knocked him to the ground, rubbed his face in СКАЧАТЬ