Now a concluding word about the biological utility of anxiety and guilt. Anxiety and guilt are painful, and
disruptive of clear, objective thinking; and the psychotherapist strives to free his patient of their grip —just as the
physician strives to free his patient of physical pain. But just as physical pain has a crucial survival -value, warning
a man that his body is in danger—so anxiety and guilt have the same survival-value, and perform the same
function, for man's mind and person.
The harmful, existential consequences of a man's irrational psycho-epistemological policies are not always
immediate or direct. If a man had no advance warnings of danger, no advance signals of disaster, he could pursue a
course of self-destruction with nothing to restrain him or to indicate that he needed to re-examine his method of
functioning—until it was hopelessly too late.
Man is free to ignore the warning-signals of danger, but the warning is there, in the form of a penalty he cannot
escape. Thus, paradoxically, pathological anxiety is at once man's protector and his nemesis. If a man defaults on
the responsibility of reason, then his self-betrayed ego becomes its own avenger.
A man need not have solved his every psychological problem before he can be free of anxiety and guilt. But it is
necessary that he correct the base of his problems: the policy of permitting some other considerations to take
precedence over his perception of the facts of reality. The determination to face his problems, to look at reality—to
restore his ego to its proper function as a tool of cognition—is the essential first step in the process by which a man
sets himself free of fear and guilt. If and to the extent that this determination is maintained and implemented,
psychological liberation will follow.