The Forger and the Pleasure of Deception
He could paint like anyone, or perhaps better—so the world believed. Every stroke, every shadow, every flicker of color seemed effortless, as if he had reached inside the soul of genius and pulled it onto the canvas. And yet, he was nothing of his own making. Every painting was a copy, a careful reconstruction of someone else’s creation. He was, by design, a shadow artist.
The paradox was intoxicating. He imagined himself a creator, an originator, yet he could create nothing truly original. Instead, he inhabited the minds of others, learned their gestures, mastered their errors. In doing so, he became a narcissist of the most exquisite kind: no one could surpass him at imitation, and in their admiration—naïve, eager, and unquestioning—he tasted the delight of mastery. He needed no one to envy him; the world envied what he could do.
From a psychoanalytic perspective, this was a mind wrapped in layers of projective identification and self-deception. He projected into his copies what he could not bear within himself: envy, unfulfilled desire, the gnawing awareness that he could never be originator. The paintings were at once his prison and his triumph, his confession and his lie. Lacan would have smiled; we are all deceived, he might have said, but this man had simply made the deception spectacularly visible.
Yet there was artistry even in the falsehood. The copies were flawed, traces of the original still peeking through—tiny discrepancies, unconscious fingerprints of truth. Observers wanted to be deceived; they wanted the thrill of believing in authenticity. In this symbiosis, both forger and audience colluded in the pleasure of the lie. Girard might have called it mimesis: the desire to possess what the other possesses, transformed into admiration, into envy, into a shared illusion.
And here, too, the literary parallel emerged. Like Kafka’s protagonist waking as something other than human, the forger lived a metamorphosis of identity. The self he inhabited—the triumphant, omnipotent imitator—was a mask over a void. Beneath it, the consciousness that he could create nothing unborrowed, that he was trapped in a perpetual play of reflection and replication. His triumph was moral, aesthetic, and psychological: a fraudster’s genius, the glory of deception, and the terror of self-knowledge, all entwined.
This is where psychoanalysis hesitates. In the clinic, one cannot judge; in the court, one cannot interpret the unconscious. Yet the inner drama is vivid: the forger swallows what gives pleasure, expels what brings discomfort, and in the process, becomes a living illustration of envy, greed, and identification. Every brushstroke, every signature, is both self-concealment and self-exposure. He has written his own story in the work of others, leaving us to ponder: who, in fact, is the originator, and who merely shadows the world?
And perhaps, like any great writer or thinker, he first had to master the works of those he admired, wrestle with their superiority, and then—if not to surpass them—at least to inhabit their genius. For the forger, as for the poet, creation is inseparable from imitation, and imitation, from desire. The pleasure of deception is the pleasure of being believed, but also the pleasure of believing oneself. And in this exquisite tension, art, envy, narcissism, and the human psyche intertwine, leaving us dazzled, unsettled, and strangely, delighted.
References
Klein, M. (1957). Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946–1963. London: Tavistock.
Lacan, J. (1966). Écrits: A Selection. New York: Norton.
Girard, R. (1961). Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Imitation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Freud, S. (1914). On Narcissism: An Introduction. Standard Edition, Vol. XIV. London: Hogarth Press.
Kafka, F. (1915). The Metamorphosis. Leipzig: Kurt Wolff Verlag.
Ogden, T. H. (1994). The Analytic Third: Working with Intersubjective Clinical Facts. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 75, 3–19.
Meltzer, D. (1988). The Apprehension of Beauty: The Role of Aesthetic Conflict in Development, Art, and Violence. Perthshire: Clunie Press.