ABSTRACT
This chapter considers undue masking to amount to psychic airbrushing, something people experience internally and communicate outwardly by embracing half-truths and committing sins of omission, commission, and distortion in what they acknowledge about themselves and others. From an interpersonalist psychoanalytic viewpoint, airbrushing is rooted in the way the parent conveys to the child the components of a good me, the version of the self that will garner approval and avoid censure, thereby reducing untoward anxiety. An extreme or pervasive underplaying of the negative through targeted airbrushing, or airbrushing that occurs as a generalized excessive niceness can lead to significant misreadings within oneself and between two individuals in a relationship. Airbrushing grows out of the same soil as a phenomenon well-known within the field of psychological assessment called social desirability.
