not being "accepted"; or if a man retreats from the challenges of life and buries himself in the "safety" of the
routine, the familiar, the undemanding, through fear of failure or of making mistakes; or if a man is compulsively
driven to the pursuit of meaningless sexual adventures, through fear of being regarded (or of regarding himself) as
"unmasculine"; or if a woman conceals and represses her desire for a career, through fear of being considered
''unfeminine"; or if a woman blinds herself to any defect in her husband, through fear of damaging their
relationship—the result, necessarily, is a profound sense of humiliation, of self-abasement, of self-renunciation,
which means: a profound loss of self-esteem.
Sometimes, of course, a fear-experience can be so intense that the capacity for thought is momentarily wiped out.
But such panic reactions pertain to short-term, emergency situations, and are necessarily short-lived. In such cases,
a person's attitude and policy toward fear is manifested through what he does when the panic dies down. Does he
then proceed to think about the experience, to assimilate it and to prepare himself for future, similar situations—in
other words, does he seek to reassert mastery and control over his life? Or does he merely shudder at the memory
of the fear, struggle to evade the issue, and hope he will not encounter such problems again, resigning himself to
the belief that, should such problems recur, helplessness is all that is possible to him?
The policy a man adopts in dealing with fear depends on whether he preserves the will to efficacy; it depends on
whether he preserves the value of self-confidence as a goal not to be relinquished, and, consequently, regards a
state of fear as the temporary and abnormal, as that which he must overcome—or whether he gives up the
expectation of achieving efficacy, resigns himself to a sense of impotence, and accepts fear as a basic, unalterable
"given" of his existence, to be endured, not to be defeated. Just as the will to understand requires that man never
resign himself to accepting the unknowable as an inherent part of his life—so the will to efficacy requires that he
never resign himself to living with uncontested fear.
It must be stressed that the concept of surrender to fear pertains to a psycho-epistemological process; the subversion
of one's consciousness, of one's faculty of awareness, in order to avoid or minimize a fear experience. This practice
is entirely different from