For example, a patient may know, abstractly, that emotions are not tools of cognition, are not criteria of truth or
falsehood, right or wrong. But this knowledge does not stop his tendency to function, in particular cases, on the
implicit premise that if he desires or fears something intensely, his emotion must be warranted and may serve as a
valid guide to action. His abstract knowledge does not stop this tendency because he does not apply that knowledge
to himself. He must be taught to do so. Or, a patient may be engaging in a course of action that he would identify as
flagrantly irrational and neurotic were he to observe it in someone else. But he exempts himself from any such
conclusions, on the basis of his vague feeling that in some unspecified way he is ''different," i.e., there are special
"extenuating circumstances" in his case. He must be led to understand the self-deception he is practicing.
As to the problem of motivation by fear, I have given many examples of it in preceding chapters. In choosing his
actions and goals, in deliberating the question of what constitutes his self-interest in various situations, a patient is
very commonly influenced by his fears: fear of failure, fear of shaking his self-esteem (or pseudo-self-esteem), fear
of provoking disapproval, fear of jeopardizing his precarious sense of "security." The therapist must first discover
the nature of the specific fears and how they operate to disintegrate a particular patient's psycho-epistemology, then
work at communicating this knowledge to the patient, so that the patient becomes more sensitive to the mechanics
of his own mental processes and is better able to catch his errors while they are occurring and to reorient his
thinking in a more realistic direction.
In untangling the roots of his patient's problems, the therapist will find that he must constantly move back and forth
between psycho-epistemological errors and emotional or motivational conflicts, i.e., between his patient's method
of thinking and his mistaken values and premises. A relationship of reciprocal causation exists between the spheres
of cognition and evaluation. Just as rational thinking encourages the formation of rational values, and the formation
of rational values encourages rational thinking—so unhealthy thinking tends to result in unhealthy values, and
unhealthy values tend to result in unhealthy thinking.
Emotional and motivational (i.e., value) disturbances tend to worsen existing psycho-epistemological errors and,
often, to create