Obviously, patients do not normally die from a deficiency of self-esteem (although sometimes they do, as in suicide
or other forms of self-destruction), but the extent of that deficiency is the extent of their inability to live. That
ability or inability is measured in terms of a man's capacity to optimize his intellectual and creative potential, to
translate that potential into productive achievement, to function effectively and unimpededly on the emotional as
well as on the intellectual level, to love and to give objective expression to his love, to explore the challenges and
reap the rewards that human existence offers to man.
If a patient must be taught that the frustrations, the despair, the wreckage of his life are ultimately traceable to his
deficiency of self-esteem and to the policies that led to that deficiency, it is equally imperative that he be taught the
solution: that supreme expression of selfishness and self-assertiveness which consists of holding his self-esteem as
his highest value and most exalted concern—and of knowing that each struggling step upward, taken in the name of
that value, carries him further from the bondage to his past suffering and closer to the sunlight reality of the human
potential.