Bad faith, identity and omnipotence

Abstract

The starting point of the paper is a phenomenon which at first glance presents itself in the analytical practice like a subtle and particular form of unfulfillment of the fundamental rule. The splitting mechanisms are utilized to lay a trap. The finality seems to be to disguise the point of emergency and to deviate the interpretation. The analytical situation is communicated in its totality
with a distortion destined to produce a maladjustment in the analyst’s perception of and acting on the situation.
This distortion imposed on the analytical situation reflects an equivalent distortion of life and of the Ego. Bad faith appears as a characterological feature, but does not constitute an isolated one, en the contrary, it covers the person in his totality and becomes a mode of his life. The Ego erects its structure through the biological process of organic matureness and through the successive introjections which are integrated into its structure and contribute to the formation of its character. It seems that these
introjections, in cases of bad faith, provide the Ego with masks and not with features. Bad faith seems to correspond to a state of internal instability of the Ego: a multiplicity of identifications which have not settled, contemporary and contradictory, and which make the patient live and present himself as if he were various characters without being able to tell whom he authentically is.
The phenomenological description made by J. P. Sartre of bad faith and unauthenticity, in “L’Étre et le Néant”, notwithstanding the differences in terminology and the basic theoretical oppositions, provides valuable data from the analytical point of view: bad faith is a situation or fading psychical structure, oscillating between falsehood and sincerity; it presents itself as an escape when
facing anxiety and as a rejection of the compromising election of one’s self and of one’s objects; it implies a situation of unauthenticity of the Ego confronting its internal characters and its objects, preventing ah real contact of the former with
the latter. Thus the bad faith phenomenon seems to be more delimited but its finality and mechanisms are not, as yet, understood.
Ordinary observation as well as patient’s conduct in the analysis show that bad faith appears where the person fears that his omnipotence is in danger. The patient is running away from a situation of persecution, trying to present, successively, different but empty masks. Bad faith appears basically as a Proteus-hike game between internal divided characters, destined to maintain
the omnipotence. In bad faith, two types of omnipotence are to be found: en the one hand, the mechanism which creates the metamorphosis, the ghosts and the mirages; and, en the other, the omnipotence of the defended part of the Ego that uses
this mechanism. The omnipotence of bad faith is ambiguous. The person has to deceive himself at the same time that he deceives the object, which indicates how close they are to each other. On this level, bad faith appears like an attempt to mock the Super-Ego. The Ego defends itself from the Super-Ego by handling multiple identities. In the last instance, bad faith seems to belong to the psychopathology of idealization. It comes from the incapacity of the Ego to surpass an experience of disillusion with the primitive object —the breast— which prevents the synthesis of the object as well as of the Ego and the total access towards the depressive
position. As a part of the primitive persecutory object remains unsynthetized and unmitigated, one part of the Ego keeps the omnipotence of the idealized object assimilated in it, and defends itself from the persecutory object through a specific technique. He has lost faith in the real or ideal objects of the external world. He finds himself in front of a distorted and contradictory Super-Ego. To keep its omnipotence, the Ego has not alternative but to utilize its own dissociation to escape the persecutors and the Super-Ego. To this end, it uses its masks and persons and, like Proteus, runs away from one form to the other to elude its proper definition.