What Is Mental Health?

What Is Mental Health?

What constitutes a mentally healthy person? I do not think that you are going to find the answer to this question in any text book. I must say, however, that Sigmund Freud* (see list for further reading) did talk about normal persons having the ability to love and work and that Alfred Adler implied that normalcy is the absence of neurosis (by which, he probably meant not seeking personal superiority, which would then imply accepting ones sameness and equality with all people) and so on.

It seems that psychologists and psychiatrists are more at home talking about unhealthy persons instead of healthy persons; they have told us a lot about what constitutes psychopathology but little about mental health. There is even a big book, the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, talking about all kinds of mental illnesses but not a similar big book talking about mental health. One would think that to talk about psychopathology that we must first establish psychological health, for lack of health is in reference to health.

There is no guide out there on what constitutes mental health. In this essay, I will briefly define what constitutes mental health.

 

UNCONDITIONAL POSITIVE SELF ACCEPTANCE

In every day language, mental health is characterized by the individual accepting himself, as he is; accepting other people, as they are, accepting the world, as it is, and having no inner compulsion to reject anything and or turn anything into what he thinks that they should become.

The mentally healthy person does not have an obsession to make himself, other people and the world into an idealized, perfect version of them. (See Carl Rogers, Client Centered Therapy.)

 

NON-JUDGMENTAL APPROACH TO THE SELF

The mentally healthy person does not judge himself, other people, etc, with the yardsticks of an idealized self, as either good or bad. He accepts himself and other people as they are; neither seeing people, himself included, as good nor bad. (See Albert Ellis, Cognitive Behavior Therapy.)

He accepts people in an unconditional positive manner. However, people’s behavior can be pro-social or antisocial; behavior is different from the individual. Of course, antisocial behaviors are to be rejected. (See Harry Stack Sullivan, Interpersonal Theory of Psychology.)

 

PRESENCE OF PEACE AND HAPPINESS

Because he accepts himself, other people and the world as they are and has no wish for them to become different and perfect he is generally peaceful and happy. Mental health is characterized by the presence of peace and happiness. (See Helen Schucman, A Course in miracles.)

Are you unconditionally positively self accepting, unconditionally positively accepting of other people? Are you peaceful and happy most of the time? Do you smile and laugh a lot? Are you friendly towards most people you see? Do you love and respect most people you encounter? Do you forgive those who did something wrong to you or do you bear grievances and seek punishment for your so-called enemies? Are you caring or hateful? Do you get along with most people? Do you feel connected, joined and unified with people?

If your answer to these questions is mostly yes, you are mentally healthy, if not you are not mentally healthy.

 

PERSONALITY VERSUS MENTAL HEALTH

Beginning from the day a child is born on earth his inherited biological constitution begins to interact with his physical and social environment. Something in the child, I call it the unknown life force, take the child’s experiences and formulate a personality for him. By age six the human child has a perceivable personality already in place, albeit in outline form. By adolescence, age thirteen, the individual’s personality is, as it were, set in stone and seldom changes unless he undergoes traumatic injury to his brain, and sometimes to his spine. (See George Kelly, Personality as Personal Construct.)

Using his biological datum and social and physical experiences each human child constructs a personality for himself; he forms a habitual pattern of relating to other people and to his world in general.

The human personality, I agree with Carl G. Jung, is not the entire human being. I believe that there is another side to us. I do not know what that side to us is. However, if it makes you feel comfortable to call it spirit (soul), by all means do so, provided that you do not limit it with your understanding of what it is supposed to be.

I do not think that any human being living in body understands the aspect of him that is beyond flesh. I prefer to call it the unknown part of us, an X.

What seems self evident to me is that that unknown part of us is the same in all people. The unknown X in all people is the same, equal and one in all people. (See Henry Bergson’s philosophical writing.)

The actuating force in people is one and simultaneously infinite in numbers. One force is itself and yet is each of us, animals, trees etc.

In its true essence that force remains itself but in us takes on the characteristics of our personalities. Our bodies and social experiences give that unknown force in us our personalities.

When our bodies die, that which gave the unknown force our personalities dies. Our personalities die with our physical death. However, the life force in us continues to exist as it has always existed. The life force is eternal, immortal, permanent, timeless and changeless.

In body (matter space and time) the life force, which can also be called universal intelligence, takes on our personalities and lives as each of us. I believe that the body (genes) each child is born in and his social experiences influence how the life force constructs the individual’s personality.

In the here and now world, each of us has a personality. (The term personality is derived from persona, a mask, a role each of us is playing in the world of time and space). The individual’s personality, the mask he wears to navigate this world is not all there is to him. Beneath his mask is an unknown self.

Some personalities are normal and some are abnormal. There are different levels of normalcy and abnormalcy. We know about the various personality disorders (paranoid, schizoid, schizotypal, narcissistic, histrionic, borderline, antisocial; avoidant, possessive-compulsive, dependent and passive aggressive) and the more serious disorders, the psychosis (schizophrenia, mania, delusion, depression etc).

Within the spectrum of normalcy are different levels of being. Many persons who are called normal persons, as Henry Thoreau observed, live lives of quiet desperation. They are suffering and do not know how to get out of their suffering. These are the people that psychotherapists are supposed to help except that many psychotherapists do not know how to help them.

 

MENTAL DISORDER IS SELF REJECTION; ATTEMPT TO BE DIFFERENT

In the course of my life time, I learned that all people are the same and that even their mental illnesses have commonalities to them. Despite the interesting stuff written by mental health professionals (such as the current emphasis on biochemistry) the fact is that all mental health issues inhere in people’s efforts to run away from their real selves and become who they are not, in fact.

People see who they are, in fact, and in varying degrees do not like what they know themselves to be. They know themselves to be born and live in bodies, bodies that are weak and vulnerable to all sorts of diseases. They live to work for their bodies. They earn material things that protect and defend their bodies. Then after a hundred years of slaving for their bodies those bodies die, rot and smell to high heaven. The dead and rotting human body is not a pretty sight, it smells worse than feces.

People appreciate the limitations of their bodies. They know that if body is all that they are that they are not worth much, certainly they are not worth more than other animals.

Natural forces, such as tsunami, hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, draughts, earthquakes, volcanoes, plagues etc sweep people to death, as they sweep animals and trees to death.

If all people are is their bodies, they are not worth much; in fact, they have no worth and value; their worth is make belief, a made up value is no value.

People appreciate their existential nothingness, worthlessness, valuelessness, purposelessness, and meaninglessness and despair. All human beings have underlying despondency (depression, melancholia, dysthymia, call it what you like). The nature of existence in body and on earth produces depression (self devaluing) in human beings.

 

EXISTENTIAL DEPRESSION

Each human being has existential depression, a depression from the awareness of the ugly realities of our being on planet earth. (Some are more acutely aware of this underlying depression than others.) (Clinical depression is characterized by loss of interest in the activities of daily living: lack of interest in food, work, sports, socializing, self grooming and a desire to harm ones self and or die.)

We do not accept existential depression; for one thing, nobody likes the dystonia of feeling bad, so we try to avoid feeling depressed. (See the existential writings of Jean Paul Sartre, Albert Camus etc.)

 

EXISTENTIAL DELUSION/PARANOIA

One of the ways we prevent awareness of our underlying existential depression is delusion (paranoia). (Clinical paranoia, aka delusion disorder is characterized by a sense of inadequacy and compensatory sense of power and grandiose importance, suspiciousness, lack of trust in other people, guardedness, and belief that other people consciously demean one, fear of belittlement, humiliation, degradation, disgrace, criticism and anything that seems to suggest that the individual is not very important.)

Delusion or paranoia is the construction of a different self, a false self that is different from the depressed self. The paranoid knows that inside him is a depressed self(a weak, vulnerable self that would die) and he tries to flee from that depressed self by constructing a false grandiose self (an all powerful, ideal, perfect, immortal self) and identify with that false self. (See William Meissner, Paranoid Process.)

All human beings construct false ideal selves, identify with them and defend them as if those false selves are their true selves. (See Karen Horney, Neurosis and Human Growth.)

All human beings have delusion/paranoia in varying degrees. The difference between the clinically paranoid person and the normal person is only in degrees, not in absolute terms.

 

MANIA

The more active type person flees into mania. (In clinical mania the individual feels excited, euphoric, lacks good judgment and is deluded; he believes that he is a very famous person, such as the richest man in his world.) Mania is a product of man’s search for an ideal self. In mania the individual uses his mind to construct an ideal self, a false self and tries to become it. He behaves as if he is the ideal self. The act of using the mind to make one seem like an important, famous self excites the human body, hence in mania the body is invariably excited, aroused and hyperactive.

If you dwelled on the body alone, as neuroscientists do, in mania, you would observe excited neurochemicals like norepinephrine. Modern neuroscience tells us that the presence of those excitatory neurochemicals is the cause of mania.

It is mind, thinking, and the wish for an important self, when the manic person becomes aware that he is an unimportant self that produces the perceived elevated excitatory neurochemicals in the manic person’s body. Mind, that is, thinking, is the cause of all mental illnesses.

Mental means thinking; mental illness means illness of thinking. The nature of the human body affects thinking but thinking itself is what is normal or abnormal.

 

SCHIZOPHRENIA

Some persons seek their fictional importance in schizophrenia. (In clinical schizophrenia, a psychosis, the individual generally is deluded, that is, believes in what is not true as true and hallucinates in one or more of the five senses…auditory, visual, olfactory, tactile etc. There are many forms of schizophrenia, such as paranoid, disorganized, undifferentiated, catatonic, residual etc.) They use their thinking, mind, to construct bogus important selves and identify with those false selves.

The schizophrenic sees himself as god, that is, as all important, which he thinks wipes out his unimportant self. Of course, he is not the great self he fancies himself as.

Other people know that he is not god, Zeus or whatever he fancies himself to be. People laugh at the eighteen year old boy claiming to be god.

He tries to retain his grandiose self concept/self image by avoiding people. In social isolation he manages to convince himself that he is the god that he wants to be. Thus he walks the streets imagining him god etc. (See David Swanson et all, Paranoia.)

(Most people do not know that the schizophrenic, disorganized type, eating out of garbage cans actually sees himself as god, as more important than all human beings).

 

ANXIETY

In anxiety disorders (neurosis) the individual has a wish for importance but knows that he is not important. He is able to test reality; he knows what is real and what is not real. But the wish for importance is strong in the neurotic. He has perpetual conflict between his desired ego ideal (important self) and his earthly reality (nothingness). (In clinical anxiety the individual experiences intense fear without the normal causes of fear been present. He feels heart racing, rapid breathing, excited nervous system; rapid talking, tort muscles and the desire to either fight of flee from something. There are many types of anxiety disorder, such as generalized anxiety, panic, agoraphobia, sociophobia, obsessive-compulsive etc.)

The desire for important self and the fear of existential nothingness produces anxiety in the neurotic person. Anxiety disorders can be subsumed in personality disorders.

For our present purposes, what is salient is that the neurotic, the personality disordered person wants to seem powerful, important, rich, famous etc but knows that he is not so but struggles along and experiences anxiety. (See David Shapiro, Neurotic Styles; Isaac Marks, Anxiety.)

 

MEDICATIONS

In the contemporary world mental disorders are treated with medications: anxiety with anxiolytics (such as Valium, Xanax, Librium etc), depression with antidepressants (such as Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil etc), mania with anti mania medications (such as Lithium, Depakote etc), schizophrenia with neuroleptics (such as Haldol, Zyprexa, Risperdal etc). These medications do reduce the gross symptoms of mental disorders but, ultimately, do not heal them. However, until there is a cure they seem called for and the mentally ill ought to avail themselves of medications.

But while taking their medications, the mentally ill ought to try to remember to give up their pursuit of specialness and separation; they ought to remember that in eternity we are joined though in time we are separated. All people ought to reduce their separation from each other via love and forgiveness.

In absolute terms return to union, that is, the relinquishment of the separated self, the ego and its body, is mental health. But we cannot be aware of union and still be on earth. On earth, the opposite of union, we are separated and so will seem until we exit from earth (we are always in unified state but forget it and dream that we are separated selves).

On earth, the individual can remember his oneness (in spirit) with all people and love all of them. In love and forgiveness the individual attains a measure of mental health, the relative mental health that is possible while we live in the world of separation. Absolute mental health (healthy thinking, which is unified thinking) is only possible in perfect love, which can only obtain in unified state.

 

SOLUTION

There is only one solution to the human problem of self rejection: accept the truth. The truth is that as bodies we are nothing. This is literal, not figurative. If you melted down the individual’s body and collected the trace elements in it and sold them you would obtain about a dollar. The individual’s body is composed of traces of many elements (carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, potassium, magnesium, sodium, calcium, sulfur, phosphor etc) and the atoms that make them up. (Atoms, in turn, are made of particles, such as neutron, proton, electron, quarks etc).

The human body is composed of matter. Our bodies are temporary agglomeration of matter. Our bodies are elements held together by chemical bonds.

When we die the chemical bonds holding together the various elements that constitute our bodies dissolve and the various elements continue existing as part of matter in the universe. What was your body today may be in trees, animals, stars etc tomorrow.

 

PURSUIT OF IDEAL, PERFECT SELF

Each of us is aware of the nothingness of our physical being. This awareness of our existential nothingness produces existential depression. The human child, by age six, if not earlier, had experienced attack on his sense of specialness, his narcissism, vanity and pride, he had existential depression. He does not like it and resolves to make his self seem special and important and constructs a personality that seems important.

All human beings pursue ideal selves (power and superiority). The human personality is defined by how each of us rejects his original depressed self view and pursues a fictional special, important self.

Those who pursue inordinately important self are neurotics and psychotics; normal persons are doing the same thing that abnormal persons are doing but in a more tame manner.

To be a human being is to reject the bodily self and aspire after a mentally invented ideal self and associate that self with the body and defend it.

The ideal self is a chimera, it is not real but it is a desired self and it is defended. Defense of the false ideal self makes it seem real in the defender’s mind.

 

 

NO SELF OR UNIFIED SELF

When the individual stops defending his fictional special self he recognizes that it is a false, non-existent self. If you stop defending your idea of self (and its body) you suddenly become aware that you have no self. (There is still a self, the observing self, the self that is aware that it is not its body and personality.)

If you have no self then what and who are you? This is what most of us are afraid of finding out.

 

MEDITATION

One way to find out that ones ideal self is fictional is to meditate. In meditation the individual consciously invalidates his idea of self. He tells himself that he is not the self that he can think of, that he does not know who he is, does not know who other people are and does not know what anything is or means. He negates all ego based conceptual processes and remains quiet. In silence he wants to know if he has a different self other than the self he is aware of.

If the individual truly permits his separated ego self to die, albeit momentarily in meditation, he experiences no-self, that is, knows that he does not have a separated ego self. He experiences what Buddha called Nirvana (no separated self) and Hinduism calls Samadhi (unified self).

If you stopped defending your idea of your self what would happen is that you discover that you have no separated self. You would discover what Buddha discovered twenty five hundred years ago: that there is a life force that exists in all of us but is not our individual personalities.

One life manifests in infinite appearances, including in human personalities, animals, trees etc.

In its true state, life is one; but in its manifest state, life is infinite in numbers. There is only one force in the universe, one self, one life and intelligence. That one life is called God by religionists. But it has no name.

Life is one and simultaneously infinite in numbers. It is in itself and in all its parts, as all its parts are in it and in each other.

In its true state, life is not physical and has no dimension. It is not here or there. It is nowhere and everywhere. It does not see for there is nobody that is not it to see. It has no sense of I and not I, no subject and object. Nobody on earth can describe life.

Life in its true state does not even know that it is operating on earth. As it were, it goes to sleep and dreams our world but in its wake state does not know about the existence of our world.

When each of us awakens to the awareness of that universal life force he does not remember been part of our present world (actually, at first he does so vaguely but soon forgets it, as we do on earth: upon waking up from sleep, forget what happened when we were sleeping and dreaming).

When one returns to this world of ours one does not remember the world of life in its true essence (its categories are not translatable to the categories of our world).

The lesson from meditation is that what we currently call our selves, our separated ego selves housed in bodies, is not our real self. Our real self is unified spirit (that which is not in body I call spirit, but it has no name).

Our true self is one and simultaneously infinite in numbers. As long as we are identified with the separated ego selves in bodies, however, we do not know about the existence of the real self. At the moment we identify with separated ego selves and defend them and they seem real to us. As far as we are concerned the separated ego selves are the only selves we know of.

We can make our separated ego selves, our human personalities, as loving as is possible. Forgiving those who harmed us (harmed our separated ego selves, for the spirit self cannot be harmed) is one way to feel peaceful and happy.

In this essay, I am working with the separated ego self; I am not dwelling on metaphysics. Our current challenge is how to make our separated ego selves, our human personalities, as lovely as is possible. Those who want to get in touch with their real self, the unified spirit self, know what to do. (Forgiveness removes the mask over love/union/god/heaven; the love/union that is always there but hidden by our wish for separated self and our unloving behaviors; forgive, love, meditate and you experience your real self, the unified spirit self, our shared one self.)

 

PURSUIT OF FALSE SPECIALNESS AND WORTH

In the meantime, we are on earth and feel like we are nothing and attempt to make our selves seem like we are something special and important. The various ways we go about making ourselves seem important is our personalities.

To the extent that we pretend to be special and important when we are not we are not healthy.

A healthy person accepts that in body and separated state that he is totally unimportant (but that in his unified spirit state that he has total importance).

Mental health lays in not taking ones ego and bodily self too seriously, in seeing ones self for what one is, nothing. In body we are nothing but in spirit we are everything; in separated state we are nothing; in unified state we are everything.

(Body is a means of separation, of fragmenting that which is one and identifying with a fragment as who one is. Spirit is unified and each of us is all of us. Our worth lies in our unified spirit state.)

When the individual pursues ideal separated false self he is mentally sick; when he gives up pursuit of all ideal selves and accepts that on earth he is not worth much and makes the most of it he is normal. When the individual accepts his physical nothingness and spiritual everything-ness he is healthy.

Human beings do not have to do anything to be their real selves; they do not have to expend any energy to be their real selves (in spirit and in time). On the other hand, they spend an awful amount of energy trying to become who they are not: false, special separated self. They expend energy defending that which, in fact, does not exist. (Pity them for only insane persons can spend the type of energy they spend defending a chimera, a futile self, a self that merely gives them pain, suffering, and anxiety and does not in fact exist).

People are truly an amusing bunch. They cause themselves a whole lot of suffering trying to become a self (ideal self) that they are not and cannot be. They will always be as their creator is and as he created them, unified spirit, though they pretend to be separated selves housed in bodies.

If the individual lets go of his separated consciousness he literally awakens in the awareness of unified self. It is separated consciousness that keeps people in the world of separation and specialness, the world of space, time and matter. Let go of your consciousness of I and you would end perception of yourself and others and simply descend back into the sea of wholeness, peace, joy, in a word, bliss.

 

DISCUSSION

We can get carried away by interesting talk on spirituality. However, I am mostly interested in the here and now world. Whereas the individual ought to make accommodations to some metaphysics, what is salient is how he lives in the here and now world.

In the here and now, the individual ought to give up all ideas that he is special and important; he ought to quit pursuing ideal selves and perfect selves and ideal social institutions and ideal worlds and simply accept his real self, other people’s real selves’ and the real world.

The individual’s earthly self is composed of his body and his personality, both of which are imperfect. He has to accept his imperfect body and personality and not seek to make them what they are not, ideal. He ought to live with what is, not what should be.

What make for the most effective adaptation to the exigencies of this world are science and its applied form, technology. The individual ought to study science and technology and use them to deal with the exigencies of this world. He ought not to try to escape into some ideal fantasy world that does not exist. The individual must always redirect his thinking, mind, to the here and now world.

One must accept ones self, other people and the world as they are, not as they should become; ideals and perfection are imaginary mental constructs that do not exist in the physical and social world. It is in accepting the real self and real world that human beings find peace and happiness, and mental health.

 

CONCLUSION

It is ones thinking, mind, which invented the ideal self that one identifies with and seeks to become and in pursuing which one gives one pain and suffering.

What ones thinking/mind invented ones thinking can also reinvent. One can use ones thinking to understand that the ideal self is impossible of attainment and give it up. Simply stop desiring to be an ideal self and stop defending your idea of an ideal self and be your real self.

Improper use of thinking, that is, misuse of mind made the individual unhappy and proper thinking can make the individual happy. It is all a manner of thinking. One must train ones mind to think right; one must discipline ones mind to think along the line that would generate peace and happiness for one and all people.

I have summarized what constitutes mental health and mental disorder. I have done my part; I have shared information available to me. However, until one practice the information explored here one would not know how powerful and transformative it is.

Go practice the information on mental health. Accept your real self (which, ultimately, is unified spirit) but which, in time, is the self you see in your body. Accept your body and personality as they are and stop trying to become an ideal, perfect, special person. If you honestly do so you would find your life changed, turned around. You would begin living a successful life, and become the type of person other people want to be around with and want to hear talk.

I have given you this information for free; it is now up to you to practice it. If you do you would find your life on earth peaceful and happy. The ideas in this essay will enable you live a healthy life.

If you share this information with other people you would find that you would be able to make a living rather effortlessly. Africans suffer to irk out a meager living because they do not care or love one another. I have shown you that love and caring for other people is the only way to live a fulfilling life, not by pilling up empty titles.

I give you my peace and joy; share that peace and joy; give it away to other people. It is in giving it away that you receive it; it is in loving other people that one loves ones self; it is in love that we are mentally healthy.

 

Cheers,

Ozodi Thomas Osuji, PhD

May 25, 2007

[email protected] e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

 

FURTHER READING

Adler, Alfred (1999) the Neurotic Constitution. New York : International Library of Psychology, Routledge.

Allport, Gordon (1961) Pattern and Growth in Personality. New York : Harcourt College Publishers.

(1975) The Nature of Prejudice. Westport , CN: Greenwood Press.

American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, (1994) Washington , DC . American Psychiatric Press.

Ansbacher, Henz .L. and Ansbacher, Rowena, R. (1964) The Individual Psychology of Alfred Adler. New York : Harper Torchbooks.

Ayer, A.J. (1968) The Origins of Pragmatism. London : Macmillan.

Beck, Aaron (1990) Cognitive Therapy for Personality Disorders. New York : Guilford Press.

Camus, Albert, (2003) The Stranger. New York : Sparks Publishing Group.

Ellis, Albert (2004) Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy. New York : Prometheus Book Publishers.

Eriksson, Erik (1993) Childhood and Society. New York : W.W. Norton.

Freud, Anna. (1980) The Ego and its Mechanisms of Defense. In The Writings of Anna Freud. New York : IUP.

Freud, Sigmund (1961) The Life and Works of Sigmund Freud, Ed Ernest Jones. New York : Lionel Trilling and Steven.

Fromm, Eric (1947) Escape from Freedom. New York : Routledge.

Horney, Karen (1991) Neurosis and Human Growth. New York : W.W. Norton.

Jung, Carl G. Basic Writings of C.G. Jung. Princeton , New Jersey : Princeton University Press.

Kelly, George. (1955) The Psychology of Personal Constructs. New York : W.W. Norton.

Laing, R.D. (1960) The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness. New York : Penguin.

(1961) Self and Others. New York : Penguin.

(1964) the Politics of Experience and the Bird of Paradise. New York : Penguin.

Maslow, Abraham. (1998) Maslow on Management. New York : John Wiley and Sons.

(1970) Motivation and Personality. New York : Harper

Meissner, William W. (1994) Psychotherapy and the Paranoid Process. New York : Aronson, Jason Publishers.

Rogers, Carl. (1951) Client Centered Therapy. London : Constable.

Ross, Elizabeth Keble (1969) On Death and Dying. New York : Simon & Schuster/Touchstone.

Sartre, Jean Paul. (2003) the Philosophy of Jean Paul Sartre. New York : Knopf Publishing Group.

Schucman, Helen (1976) A Course in Miracles. Tiburon, CA. Foundation for Inner Peace.

Shapiro, David (1999) Autonomy and the Rigid Character. New York : Basic Books

----------------- (1999) Neurotic Styles. New York : Basic Books.

Skinner, B.F. (2002) Beyond Freedom and Dignity. New York : Hackett Publishing.

 

Sullivan, Harry Stack. (1953) The Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry. New York : W.W. Norton.

Swanson, David et al. (1970) The Paranoid. Boston : Houghlin, Mifflin.

Szasz, Thomas. (1961) The Myth of Mental Illness. New York : Harper and Row.

Underhill, Evelyn. (1911) Mysticism.

Vaihinger, H. (1935) The Philosophy of “As If.” London : Kegan Paul Publishers

Zimbado, Phillip. (1990) Shyness. New York : Addison Wesley.