ABSTRACT
Elizabeth Tabak de Bianchedi (1993) and her long-term study group (de Bianchedi et al., 2000) studied “the various faces of lies” in Bion’s work and in the work of others over many years. After considerable deliberation they were able to forge a categorical system of untruths along a gradient: falsehoods or falsities → lies → Lies. (Note that the first “lie” is spelled with a lower-case 1 and the second with an upper-case L to in order to differentiate significantly between the two.) Bion seems to have been the only—or at least the first—analyst since Freud to deal with the theoretical and clinical aspects of prevarications, including the question of whether liars could even be analysed. Bion, unlike Klein, believed that they could be.
