adore her, that their adoration fill the vacuum of the ego she does not possess;
—The man who never forms independent judgments about anything, but who seeks to compensate by making
himself authoritatively knowledgeable concerning other men's opinions about everything;
—The man who works at being aggressively "masculine," whose other concerns are entirely subordinated to his
role as woman-chaser, and who derives less pleasure from the act of sex than from the act of reporting his
adventures to the men in the locker room;
—The woman whose chief standard of self-appraisal is the "prestige" of her husband, and whose pseudo-self-
esteem rises or falls according to the number of men who court her husband's favor;
—The man who feels guilt over having inherited a fortune, who has no idea of what to do with it and proceeds
frantically to give it away, clinging to the "ideal" of altruism and to the vision of himself as a humanitarian, keeping
his pseudo-self-esteem afloat by the belief that charity is a moral substitute for competence and courage;
—The man who has always been afraid of life and who tells himself that the reason is his superior "sensitivity,"
who chooses his clothes, his furniture, his books, and his bodily posture by the standard of what will make him
appear "idealistic."
Among defense-values, those of a religious nature figure prominently. In such cases, obedience to some religious
injunction (s) is made the basis of pseudo-self-esteem. Faith in God, asceticism and systematic self-abnegation,
adherence to religious rituals, are devices commonly employed to allay anxiety and purchase a sense of worthiness.
Still another type of defense-value may be observed in the person who rationalizes behavior of which he feels
guilty by telling himself that such behavior "does not represent the real me," that "the real me is my aspirations."
Such a person supports his pseudo-self-esteem by the vision of himself as an aspirer—an aspirer who is prevented
from acting in accordance with his professed ideals by reasons beyond his control, such as the evil of "the system,"
the malevolence of the universe, the tragedy of some unspecified "cir-