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Or consider the fascinating case known to researchers of a 68-year-old woman, let’s call her HRC. Asked by an interviewer on national television whether she had ever lied to the American people, she replied “I don’t believe I ever have,” as if were possible to be in doubt whether you had deliberately told a falsehood. Asked if she had always told the truth, her reply was equally evasive: “I’ve always tried to.”

It is not that the dissociative personality says things he knows to be false or does things he knows to be in violation of his prior commitments. Rather, where there is a conflict between self-perception and reality, his subconscious simply substitutes the one for the other. HRC has an image of herself as an honest person. Presented with evidence she had not been, she could only incorporate it into her pre-existing image of herself. If she had lied, it was something she could not help.

I would not go so far as the distinguished therapist Evan Solomon, who in a recent issue of the Maclean’s Journal of Medicine diagnosed Justin Trudeau as a kind of psychopath, alternately charming (“the romantic”) and homicidal (“the killer”). I think in all likelihood he poses no danger to anyone but the economy. Still, a number of recent incidents give one pause.

There is, for example, the matter of the Saudi arms contract. It is logically possible to be in favour of selling $15-billion worth of armoured vehicles to one of the world’s most repressive regimes — that would describe the Conservative position — as it is also possible to be against it, as the Liberals seemed to be in opposition. The party’s current position, on the other hand, as described by the Global Affairs Minister, Stephane Dion, is that it doesn’t approve of the contract it is in the process of implementing.