Les approches psychanalytiques du mensonge

This article shows the need to use the notion of the lie to describe clinical situations as yet too poorly studied. This notion unifies a corpus hitherto too broad and imprecise because of the diversity of the lexical categories used. From a clinical standpoint, it provides better understanding of the compulsion to lie to other people. By categorizing liars as impostors, or as mythomaniacs, there is a danger of obliteration of the transference-cons-transference dimension of their behavior.