e nurses his wives, "thousands of
them, the most beautiful women in creation". Or the delusion may take
the line of the "suffering hero", the subject imagining himself a
great man shut up in this place by the machinations of his enemies;
the doctors are spies and enemy agents, and the nurses also act
suspiciously; his food is poisoned, and he is kept in a weak and
helpless condition, all out of fear of him. It is impossible to argue
the patient out of his delusions by pointing out to him how clearly
they conflict with reality; he evades any such test by some
counter-argument, no matter how flimsy, and sticks to his dream or
make-believe.

Autistic thinking is contrasted with realistic thinking, which seeks
to check up with real facts; it may be contrasted also with socialized
thinking, which submits to the criticism of other people; and it may
even be contrasted with self-criticized thinking, in which the
individual scrutinizes what he has imagined, to see whether it is on
the whole satisfactory to himself, or whether it simply gratified a
single or momentary impulse that should be balanced off by other
tendencies.

Invention and Criticism

"Criticism"--the word has been used repeatedly, and it is time it gave
an account of itself. Criticism evidently demands balancing off one
desire by another. One tendency gets criticized by running afoul of
another tendency, one idea by conflicting with another idea. We
concoct a fine joke to play on our friend; but then the thought comes
to us that he may not take it kindly; we don't want to break with our
friend, and so we regretfully throw our promising invention on the
scrap heap. That is self-criticism, the {510} balancing off of one
impulse by another. Self-criticism is obnoxious to the natural man,
who prefers to follow out any tendency that has been aroused till it
reaches its goal; but he learns self-criticism in the hard school of
experience. For plenty of criticism is directed upon the individual
from without.

Criticism is directed upon him by the facts of the real world, so soon
as he tries to act out what he has imagined. Often his invention will
not work, his plan does not succeed, and he is involved in chagrin and
even pain. He must perforce cast away his plan and think up a new one.
At this point the "weak brother" is tempted to give up trying, and
take refuge in autistic thinking, but the stronger individual accepts
the challenge of reality. He sees that an