Self-Deception

"If we turn first to the context in which a person puts himself in self-deception, we can say, generally, that such a person has three options. We suppose, of course, that the individual is in a situation in which he is strongly inclined to a form of engagement which is radically inconsistent with the person's governing principles (the person's avowed aims, ideal, values, cultivated tastes, moral principles). One option ... is for the individual to forego the engagement, or to abandon it.... Normally, this is the chosen option of the adult person. To say that a person has put himself in self-deception, however, is to say that the person could not bring about a total abandonment of the engagement.
"A second option is to pursue the show more engagement, the person avowing it as HIS. To do this would be for the person to face a spiritual crisis... the betraying of the self....
"If there is a stalemate between inclinations which the individual will not give up, and the refusal by the person to avow these inclinations as his, there then remains one last option: the individual does engage himself in the way to which he is inclined, but the person refuses to acknowledge the engagement as his. This is man neither saved nor damned, in limbo, and at war with himself. It is from this perspective, so insistently favoured by Sartre and other Existentialists that we see how someone, by reason of lack of spiritual courage, attempts to save his integrity at a price which amounts to surrendering, however indirectly, the very integrity he cherishes."
Kindle location 1376-96

"When the Freudian emphasizes the compulsiveness of the unconscious, he is calling attention to the fact that it is indeed the individual who is acting, even though there is loss of direct control by the person; when the Freudian emphasizes the inner conflict between the 'forces' within different 'systems' [ego, id, super-ego], he is pointing to the fact that the force of will is a critical factor, for the dilemma cannot be defined within, and therefore cannot be resolved within a rational framework governing both 'systems'. The 'existentially' oriented psychotherapist raises similar issues with a different emphasis: he says that the world of the patient is through and through intelligible as the world of a human being, i.e., that it is a world of engagement, not the physicist's or the disinterested observer's world; and he says, further, that it is not by reference to established universal values but by a 'free', 'arbitrary', 'absurd' choice that the world of the patient will be of one kind or another. And, because the existentially oriented therapist adopts the emphasis he does, he prefers not to speak of a 'patient' at all.
"....The futility of preaching to the neurotic has long been remarked by the psychiatrically oriented. Direct appeals to integrity and moral concern, by evoking the motives of self-deception, strengthen the inclination to it and are self-defeating.
"What the self-deceiver specifically lacks is not concern or integrity but some combination of courage and a way of seeing how to approach his dilemma without probable disaster to himself.... He needs someone who can help him, tactfully but persistently, through a detailed consideration of the texture of life.... [F]or the self-deceiver must be helped to go to the limits of his courage, but not provoked beyond the breaking point. This help is precisely what the ideal psychotherapist would offer. Of course there are no ideal therapists."
Kindle location 1424-39 show less