new psycho-epistemological errors. For example, the anxiety produced by unhealthy cognitive practices leads to
additional and often worse evasions, repressions, rationalizations, flights from reality into fantasy, etc.—which aim
at diminishing the anxiety. Or, when a sufferer from neurotic depression, passively under the sway of his emotions,
distorts his perceptions of reality in such a way as to find evidence of his worthlessness and depravity elsewhere,
his psycho-epistemology is deteriorating under the impact of his depression.
On the other hand, unhealthy psycho-epistemology leads to unhealthy motivation, i.e., to the selection of irrational
values; and the pursuit of irrational values, because they are irrational, necessitates further psycho-epistemological
self-sabotaging, further cognitive disintegration, which leads to the pursuit of irrational values, etc. For example, a
person whose "thinking" is dominated by social-metaphysical considerations may be led to accept an entirely
specious set of values, as in the case of the boy who, growing up in a bad neighborhood, becomes a criminal; and
the irrationality inherent in his criminal pursuits leads to a further corruption of his thinking processes which makes
it possible for worse and worse crimes to be acceptable to him.
A person's view and estimate of himself—his self-concept and self-evaluation—are, as we have seen, the vital
center of his psychology: they are the motor of his behavior. In attempting to understand his patient's problems and
to help solve them, the psychotherapist must constantly relate psycho-epistemological and motivational (or
emotional) disorders to the nature of the patient's self-esteem.
If, for example, a patient typically evades, represses, rationalizes in a certain area of his life—the therapist must
ask: What purpose does this serve relative to the maintenance of the patient's self-esteem (or pseudo-self-esteem)?
If, as a consequence of self-sabotaging psycho-epistemological practices, the patient's thinking is hopelessly
ineffectual in certain areas—how does that fact affect his sense of himself? If a patient is torn by desires that are
flagrantly irrational and self-destructive—what is the specific self-esteem deficiency or area of self-doubt that
blinds him and makes him unable to relinquish such desires? If a patient permits himself to be pushed into irrational
behavior by the pressure of irrational