tices tend to be self-perpetuating. The anxiety engendered by such policies encourages evasion and repression as
defenses against it—as well as the elaboration of more complex systems of neurotic defense, which require psycho-
epistemological self-sabotaging in order to be maintained (Chapter Eight).
Pathological anxiety is both a consequence of self-doubt and a cause of further self-doubt. Anxiety disintegrates the
neurotic's precarious sense of personal identity and undercuts whatever precarious confidence in his mind he may
have possessed. When that confidence is undermined, so are the firmness and objectivity of his cognitive frame of
reference. The result is a pronounced tendency to lose the distinction between the subjective and the objective,
between that which pertains to consciousness and that which pertains to existence, so that consciousness is given
primacy over existence—thus generating the cognitive distortions so characteristic of neurosis.
When a man doubts the efficacy of his mind, his tendency is to surrender to the guidance of his emotions—since
they appear to possess a certainty and authority that his intellect lacks. This is the form in which a man experiences
the process of subordinating the objective to the subjective. His emotions are not a substitute for rational cognition
at any time, but they are never a less reliable guide than in the midst of an anxiety state.
Because the experience of anxiety is so intrinsically painful, neurotics adopt a vast variety of devices and
techniques in order to defend themselves against it. Evasion, repression, and rationalization are basic and underlie
most, if not all, of such defenses.
The neurotic can blank out the reality of his objectionable actions; he can repress his resolved conflicts; he can
disown his guilt feelings; he can deny or rationalize his fear; he can seek to distract himself by the frenzied pursuit
of various activities; he can shrink the sphere of his concerns and commitments so as to avoid the challenges of the
unfamiliar; he can elaborate a fantasized self-image to protect him from a self-evaluation he dreads to
acknowledge.
Often, the repression of the anxiety problem, and of the conflicts underlying it, results in the formation of other
neurotic symptoms. One of these symptoms is particularly worthy of attention in the present context: neurotic
depression. (I do not wish to imply that all depression is necessarily a defense against anxiety; but I am