IJSP Number 6, 2024

96 preoccupy themselves with the existence considered per se , but rather with what life can offer them, namely the concrete things one can buy or appropriate from the supermarket economy. The intelligence involved in that process is on the concrete level of operations, one that can handle very well the offers or campaigns. Such people cannot and will not be clients of choice for an existential therapy (in the true transformative sense of such a serious approach), but they rather fit quite well into the large offer of all forms of counselling. What they are interested in is rather to be heard, they just want to talk about their all too important problems or everyday issues; it is rather about the ‘chimney sweeping’ or the ‘talking cure’ discovered by Bertha Pappenheim during her own therapy under Freud’s supervision. Such an ‘important’ individual, as in the ubiquitous self-importance, will always give the utmost importance to his own problems, no matter how trivial they are. On the other hand, something that is so important as self-importance is (at least for all those under its spell), should not be changed or dismissed out of hand. In fact, it should not be touched at all, but left as it is, besides maybe some little and not very significant adjustments. We should know that what lies beneath is of the outmost fragility for the self . Self-importance, as we said earlier, is just a mask or a shield, a last resort of protection an individual can muster to preserve his or her internal fragility, uncertainty, or weakness given by the weak self-esteem. Psychotherapy should, in such cases, reconstruct and reinforce the ego , as Freud himself already recognised. The client should have something to fall back to, once his or her false edifice is torn down. Although, such clients, given the circumstances of the nine-to-five life (or the rat race), are rather inclined towards the ‘more superficial’ approaches, that should not be it and cannot be all because, as David Brooks suggests: “The answer must be to stand against, at least in part, the prevailing winds of culture. The answer must be to join a counterculture. To live a decent life, to build up the soul, it’s probably necessary to declare that the forces that encourage the Big Me, while necessary and liberating in many ways, have gone too far. We are out of balance. It’s probably necessary to have one foot in the world of achievement but another foot in a counterculture that is in tension with the achievement ethos.” [17] That means that one can, and even should, live in two different worlds. One of those would be the internal world of self-esteem and appreciation of one’s uniqueness and the other the social and professional involvement where self- importance is in saddle as a necessary instrument of survival. Of course, that such a dichotomy is at first perceived as inauthenticity, but so is the inherent falsity of self-importance. We should not forget that psychotherapy should be, in Carl Rogers’s words: “… the psychological conditions that are most conductive to increasing this highly important self-awareness. With greater self-awareness, a more informed