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The authors explore the role of lies during different stages of children’s development. They analyze the way children organize their relationship with adults so as to lessen the anxieties with which they must deal. Beginning in the anal stage, children learn to fool them to protect their psychic intimacy and to emancipate themselves. During the phallic stage, children lie to counter-cathect the feeling of being intellectually dominated by adults. Then, during the oedipal stage, they use lies to thwart the parental couple but also to externalize the splitting that the incoherences of their environment produce in them.