nature and conditions of healthy self-esteem, about the cause of pathological anxiety, about the relationships among
anxiety, defense values, and neurotic symptoms. Since a patient tends to regard his problems and his mental
processes as unique, sui generis, he does not think about them abstractly and objectively, and thus is incapable of
correcting them. He must learn to recognize the wider psychological principles operative within his mind; he must
acquire a conceptual perspective from which to view himself.
One of the first and crucially important facts a patient must learn, when he enters therapy, is the relationship
between his mind and his emotions. Commonly, he suffers from the feeling that his painful emotions are
incomprehensible; he feels like an impenetrable mystery to himself. Therefore, one of the therapist's first tasks is to
help the patient to understand that his problems are solvable, that his emotions have intelligible causes. If the
patient is led to understand the relation that exists between his emotions and his values (and between his values and
his thinking or non-thinking), this understanding (even if, initially, it is only generalized and abstract) can be highly
therapeutic. It can give him confidence that his problems can be solved.
A patient is strongly inclined to regard his neurotic emotions and desires as an integral and inherent component of
his personal identity. "My (anxious or depressed or hostile or masochistic or homosexual) feelings, c'est moi. "This
attitude is obviously refractory to therapy. It is necessary to establish in the patient's consciousness a sense of
"psychological distance" between his mind or ego and his unhealthy emotions and desires, so that he can begin to
think about them with objectivity and detachment. The more clearly he understands that his feelings, however long
he may have experienced them, are not part of his nature, the more he will be motivated to identify the ideational
roots of his feelings, to untangle the causal factors involved and effect a change in his emotional responses.
It is worth observing, in this connection, that both the religious doctrine of Original Sin and the Freudian theory of
an id are disastrously harmful psychologically. Aside from the fact that they are groundless and offensive to reason,
they tend to confirm the patient's hopeless, deterministic feelings about himself and his problems. They also tend to
support the patient's inclination to