First: the therapist must be prepared to deal with and correct a policy that is virtually universal among social
metaphysicians in their first attempts at independence: their tendency to rely on their emotions as the sole form of
autonomy known to them. Attempting to break out of the frame of reference of their "significant others," social
metaphysicians often begin by feeling that they have nothing with which to defy their authorities except their own
chaotic emotions—and so they pursue any desire, without concern for its rationality or validity, provided it is not
sanctioned by those authorities. They tend to see life as a conflict between their desires and the desires of others.
Their concern is only: By whose wishes shall I be guided—mine or other people's? Such a policy, however, leaves
them as cut off from reality as they were before; it does not solve the problem of their alienation from reality, it
merely changes the form of the alienation; and, consequently, it does nothing to build an authentic self-esteem and
self-reliance. If a patient is to acquire healthy independence, genuine independence, it is his mind he must learn to
assert, not his feelings divorced from his mind.
Second: it is virtually inevitable that, in the process of seeking to free himself from his "significant others," the
patient will replace the authority of those "others" with that of the therapist; he will be "rational" and "independent"
in order to win his therapist's approval. The therapist must constantly be on guard against this trend, and must make
the patient fully aware of it. Often, however, the following kind of complication arises. The patient finds himself in
a situation where he has rationally (and correctly) decided that he should take a certain action, but he is also aware
that, in taking it, he will win approval from his therapist and that that consideration is immensely attractive to him;
the question then arises in his mind whether he should take the action, in view of the presence of social
metaphysical elements in his motivation. In such cases, he must be taught to understand that if he is rationally
convinced that a given action is right, appropriate to the facts of reality, he should take that action regardless of
whether or not other, nonrational considerations are also operative in his psychology. Consider the alternative: if he
avoids performing an action he knows to be right, in order to thwart any social metaphysical impulses within him,
then he is still placing other considerations