for responding appropriately to experiences and communications. In
contrast, neurotic behavior is often impelled by interpretations fueled by
unconscious inner tensions, and thus can be inappropriate to a given sit-
uation. Inner psychological tensions spring from, and produce, suffering.
Neurotic or psychotic behaviors tend to produce further suffering in both
the subject and those with whom he or she interacts. The Hindu postu-
late that suffering is rooted in ignorance is supported by the efficacy of
psychotherapy to relieve psychological suffering through replacing nesci-
ence of one’s own psyche with self-understanding.
In addition to the direct applications of awareness for attainment and
preservation of health, awareness in contradistinction to self-deception is
an aspect of having a healthy connection with truth in the achievement of
personhood. Deutsch articulates self-deception as follows:
Self-deception is a refusal to acknowledge who I am and what I am
doing, not out of simple ignorance but from what appears to be a kind
of unselfconscious willful perversity.^64Deutsch develops Fingarette’s view of self-deception, “that the deceiver is
one who refuses to spell out, to avow, some feature of his engagement
with the world.”^65
Deutsch distinguishes a number of forms of self-deception, which in
its primary forms involves
... breakdown of an individual’s capacity to be responsible, to be able
(and not just unwilling) to acknowledge the actualities of his or her per-
sonal identity making and to exercise one’s inherent powers to strive to-
ward integration and freedom.^66
If we conceive health broadly as well-being encompassing the achieve-
ment of personhood, Deutsch’s thought on self-deception shows how
well-being is countered by self-fragmentation. Self-deception as a form of
metaphysical illness finds intelligibility within an understanding of health
whose determinants include integration.
Finally, the ability to learn has its genesis in awareness. An
organism’s health is reflected in, and protected by, its ability (appropriate
to its species and situation) to interpret and remember experiences, for
purposes ranging from survival, to application of high levels of insight,
creativity, and problem-solving. Because of the human being’s potential
for higher order thinking, aesthetic experience, and so on, the ideal of a
high degree of health entails development of the mind’s capacities and the
exercise of creative potential. The ideal of cultural health thus requires
68 religious therapeutics