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320 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 1953
Condemning ourselves is the quickest way to get a substitute sense of worth. People who have almost, but not quite, lost their feeling of worth generally have very strong needs to condemn themselves, for that is the most ready way of drowning the bitter ache of feelings of worthlessness and humiliation. It is as though the person were saying to himself, 鈥淚 must be important that I am so worth condemning,鈥� or 鈥淟ook how noble I am: I have such high ideals and I am so ashamed of myself that I fall short.鈥� A psychoanalyst once pointedly remarked that when someone in psychoanalysis berates himself at great length for picayune sins, he feels like asking, 鈥淲ho do you think you are?鈥� The self-condemning person is very often trying to show how important he is that God is so concerned with punishing him.
Loneliness is such an omnipotent and painful threat to many persons that they have little conception of the positive values of solitude, and even at times are very frightened at the prospect of being alone. Many people suffer from 鈥渢he fear of finding oneself alone,鈥� remarks Andr茅 Gide, 鈥渁nd so they don鈥檛 find themselves at all.
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And did not Spinoza's refusing to flee from excommunication by his church and community mean the same inner battle of integrity, the same struggle for the power not to be afraid of aloneness, without which the noble Ethics, certainly one of the great works of all time, could not have been written?
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Man, furthermore, must make his choices as an individual, for individuality is one side of one鈥檚 consciousness of one鈥檚 self. We can see this point clearly when we realize that consciousness of one鈥檚 self is always a unique act鈥擨 can never know exactly how you see yourself and you never can know exactly how I relate to myself. This is the inner sanctum where each man must stand alone. This fact makes for much of the tragedy and inescapable isolation in human life, but it also indicates again that we must find the strength in ourselves to stand in our own inner sanctum as individuals.
"As the fever in our example is a symptom of the battle between the bodily powers and the infecting germs, so anxiety is evidence of a battle between our strength as a self on one side and a danger which threatens to wipe out our existence as a self on the other. The more the threat wins, the more then our awareness of ourselves is surrendered, curtailed, hemmed in. But the greater our self-strength鈥攖hat is, the greater our capacity to preserve our awareness of ourselves and the objective world around us鈥攖he less we will be overcome by the threat."