Deception, Psychotherapist and patient, Truthfulness and falsehood, Impostors and imposture, Psychoanalytic Therapy, Lying, Humanities 

This work examines the concept of deceit and its ubiquity both in everyday life and in various forms of psychopathology. It offers examples of clinical work with true impostors, those with imposturous tendencies, and those who fear they are impostors when in fact they are not. Editorial Reviews From Publishers Weekly Investigating themes of imposture and deceit, two New York City psychoanalysts offer a unique, cautionary manual that will be of great benefit to psychotherapists and thoughtful patients concerned with what really happens during the analytic hour. Using case histories, the authors demonstrate how patients often deceive their analysts or therapists through lies, omissions, secrets, elaborate denial fantasies or personal myths-and how an analyst may be totally unaware of such deceptions, which are forms of resistance aimed at subverting the treatment. Turning away from case studies to imposture in life and art, they examine David Hwang's play, M. Butterfly, based on a true story of cross-dressing, lying and spying, and look at painter Arshile Gorky, who was prone to deception, which the authors trace to devastating childhood traumas-paternal abandonment, his mother's death from starvation, exile-during the Turkish genocide of Armenians. Gediman, New York University clinical professor of psychology, wrote Fantasies of Love and Death in Life and Art; Lieberman teaches at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. Copyright 1996 Cahners Business Information, Inc.