one's duty," or being stoical or altruistic or financially successful or sexually attractive.
This complex process of self-deception, on which the neurotic builds so much of his life, holds the key to his
motivation, to his values and goals. To understand the nature and form of a particular man's pseudo-self-esteem, is
to understand the mainspring of his actions, to know "what makes him tick."
In the psychology of a man of authentic self-value, there is no clash between his recognition of the facts of reality
and the preservation of his self-esteem—since he bases his self-esteem on his determination to know and to act in
accordance with the facts of reality as he understands them. But to the man of pseudo-self-esteem, reality appears
as a threat, as an enemy; he feels, in effect, that it's reality or his self-esteem—since his pretense at self-esteem is
purchased at the price of evasion, of entrenched areas of blindness, of cognitive self-censorship. This is why a man
may be perfectly rational and lucid in an area that does not touch on or threaten his pseudo-self-esteem, and be
flagrantly irrational, evasive, defensive, and stupid in an area which is threatening to his self-appraisal. His
characteristic response to any potential assault on his pseudo-self-esteem is the suspension of consciousness. The
anxiety triggered off by such an assault acts as a psycho-epistemological disintegrator. Thus, he perpetuates the
very process of psycho-epistemological self-sabotaging by which he caused his initial failure of self-esteem.
In this phenomenon, one may see the lead to one index of mental health and illness: A man is psychologically
healthy to the extent that there is no clash in him between perceiving reality and preserving his self-esteem; the
degree to which such a clash exists, is the degree of his mental illness.
The process of evasion, repression, etc., is not sufficient to provide a neurotic with the illusion of self-esteem; that
process is only part of the self-deception he perpetrates. The other part consists of the values he chooses as the
means of achieving a sense of personal worth. In the process of choosing values, there is a fundamental difference
in principle between the motivation of a man of self-esteem and a man of pseudo-self-esteem.
An individual who develops healthily derives intense pleasure and pride from the work of his mind, and from the
achievements