IJSP Number 6, 2024

95 In contrast to self-esteem, self-importance is not at all compensated, but constantly to be compensated, or – to use the proper word for a pretty elaborated psychological scheme – ‘over-compensated’. Let us say that somebody inclined towards the superficialities of being self- important looks at the world, at others, at society. What does such a person see? To employ a concept borrowed from Transactional Analysis, we will say that such a person sees oneself as being OK. If one is OK, and that is very important, how do others look like? How can they look? Are they OK too? Or, we still need others to fail in order for us to look great and to succeed? We must make a clear differentiation here: the self-esteem based individual will present himself and the others as OK (the I’m OK you’re OK life position), and that’s the way he also feels it (congruent). On the other hand, the self-important based individual, trying hard to hide his weak self-esteem, will (falsely) present himself as OK, and the others not OK (the I’m OK you’re Not OK life position) while deep down he regards himself as not OK, the others not OK, and the situation not OK – a dangerous and precarious life position named ‘despair’ [15]. That is the position that justifies the individual to act as self-important. There is a deep need to survive, to overcome the ‘despair’ and as such we may encounter the bizarre situation in which one may reach social levels of surprising arrogance or even violence while when alone they can be rather depressed or even addicted to some substances. Such a realization is obviously rather for the inner feelings, or the intuition, and for the forces that fabricate the parade pseudo-self that is imbued with self- importance [16]. But then, what is self-importance if not the over-compensation of such a disturbing realization? Henceforth, the existential position of self- importance has to be constantly feed with the all-important ‘plastic food’ that has calories but not nutrition. It is all about arrogance and vanity which desperately try to compensate something built on a rickety and unstable foundation. Over- compensation is put in place and continuously reinforced, not only to blind others by presenting them a socially accredited image, but also to blind oneself too, in order to believe such a lie and to continue with the falsity of self-importance. If what the individual feels as incompleteness is realized on the level of rather concrete mental operations, the much-needed over-compensation is ‘fabricated’ out of the influx of thoughts, judgments, and constant comparisons with others, and made possible from the level of formal operations. Consequently, and bearing in mind this Piagetian perspective, we have here another hiatus in the individual psyche, where two contradictory directions are at work, each one handling different tools in quite antagonistic directions. Feelings tend to recognise the modest and humble state of the person, while rationalizations try to compensate a not so desirable issue by over-emphasizing the exteriority, the image presented in the show-window of social life, one’s possessions or status, namely the old slogan of “fame, fortune and glory”. Therefore, such people do not