ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses people's ability to engage in the ostensibly paradoxical activity of telling convincing lies to themselves about who they are. It argues that people can indeed, as Chomsky asserts, easily convince themselves of ludicrous propositions. The chapter focuses on the possession of unpursuable self-definitions. Some research in hypnosis bears nicely on the question of how lying to the self about the self takes place. A model is presented to show how people succeed at manufacturing conviction in pre-selected self-definitions, even when the definitions are clearly invalid. Perhaps the ability to lie effectively to the self about the self more clearly demonstrated than in hypnosis research. The hypnosis modification research has some interesting implications: it demonstrates the ease and extent to which conviction can be managed intentionally by the actor. Even someone with a barely articulated notion of what hypnosis is has little trouble gleaning from hypnotic procedures what a hypnotized person looks and acts like.
