ABSTRACT
One might say that the sorts of extreme self-deception that appear in coercive circumstances, the suspension of conviction and the ritualistic speech, constitute a situational psychopathology. Certainly self-deception implies a self-monitoring process of some sort. The process of self-deception, of course, must include not only a system of signaling a threatening idea but, also, action to forestall or mitigate that threat. Self-deceptive speech is unusual in several respects. It seems that the self-deception actually receives its final construction in the act of speech. Altogether, in self-deceptive speech, the speaker has lost the normal awareness of the listener as an independent, external figure. The kind of self-deception and self-deceptive speech is driven by anxieties of internal origin. The content of the self-deception is determined by the nature of those anxieties or, rather, the nature of the effort to dispel them.
