Fatal Lies

absolute truths. Freud posited that human beings have an infantile wish to experience again the certainty of parental declarations, the tidy polarities of good and bad, wrong and right. Such answers keep the chaos at bay— the complexities of reality, our insignificance, and our likely appointment with oblivion.

The first of our existential crises probably coincides with the onset of adolescence—a fact that provides us with a further reason to admire Robert Musil. He sets The Confusions of Young Torless in a military academy—not only to exploit the obvious resonances relating to nationalism and war, but also because such institutions are full of adolescents. Brutality is one of the things that human beings employ to make the world a simpler place—and the generation of Austrians depicted in Musil s masterpiece chose to simplify the world with devastating consequences.

Frank Tallis

London, 2008

“Questioning the Banality of Evil.” S. Alexander Haslam and Stephen D. Reicher. In The Psychologist, vol. 21, no. 1, January 2008. Published by the British Psychological Society.

“Introduction.” J. M. Coetzee. In The Confusions of Young Torless (2001) by Robert Musil. London: Penguin Harmondsworth.

The Death of Sigmund Freud: Fascism, Psychoanalysis and the Rise of Fundamentalism (2007). Mark Edmundson. London: Bloomsbury

FRANK TALLIS is a practicing clinical psychologist and an expert in obsessional states. He is the author of

A Death in Vienna, Vienna Blood,

and

Fatal Lies,

as well as seven nonfiction books on psychology and two previous novels,

Killing Time

and

Sensing Others.

He is the recipient of a Writers’ Award from the Arts Council England and the New London Writers Award from the London Arts Board.

A Death in Vienna

was short-listed for the 2005 Crime Writers’ Association Historical Dagger Award. Tallis lives in London.

Copyright © 2008 by Frank Tallis