passivity and resignation, on the premise of "I can't help it." Men can't help it—if they are taught and if they accept
a view of emotions that amounts to the medieval notion of demonology. This is the view that must be challenged
and repudiated.
Just as a patient must learn not to regard his emotions as irreducible primaries, so he must learn not to regard his
manner of thinking—is psycho-epistemology—as an irreducible primary. The task of instilling this awareness is
often exceptionally difficult: there is nothing a man is so likely to regard as irreducibly and unalterably " himself"
as his manner of thinking—not the content of his thinking, but the method. Nevertheless, to teach the patient a new
method of thinking is one of the prime tasks to which a truly effective psychotherapy must address itself—building
on the foundation of whatever elements of a rational psycho-epistemology the patient already possesses.
Consider, for example, the case of a man who habitually avoids thinking about the causes of any emotion or desire
that he suspects to be irrational, immoral, or unrealistic; he seeks to deny the existence of such feelings by means of
such devices as evasion and repression; if and when the feelings persist past his attempts to throttle them, he
sabotages his consciousness further by surrendering to them blindly, ignoring his reason and intelligence, and
resorting to additional devices of self-deception, such as self-justifying rationalizations. The emotional result is a
state of pathological anxiety. While a therapist might conceivably be able to ameliorate his patient's anxiety by
dealing with some of the specific irrationalities that triggered it off, the basic problem cannot be solved, the patient
cannot be brought to psychological health, unless his condition is attacked fundamentally, i.e., in terms of his
psycho-epistemology.
There are two categories of psycho-epistemological problems which are virtually universal among patients, and
which need to be dealt with explicitly and in depth by the psychotherapist. The first of these is the patient's failure
to think in principles about himself and his difficulties, his tendency to regard his emotions, reactions, and general
psychological state as unrelated to any wider principles or to any abstract knowledge he possesses. The second of
these problems is the patient's susceptibility to being motivated by fear, in the process of thinking about himself, his
life, and his actions.