ABSTRACT
This chapter includes dialogs showing how quickly a therapist who is on the alert for hints of self-evaluation can initiate productive interventions. Although clients come to therapy with what seem to be very different problems and issues, much of what is bothering them is generated or exacerbated by the dark side of the market system—comparison and excess competitiveness. Sometimes a client's self-evaluation is embedded in a matrix of self-defeating ideas and emotions, but sometimes it seems to have had a virgin birth—no antecedent from childhood, no mental illness. In such cases, the influence of the market system in promoting self-evaluation is most clear and easiest to reverse. "Roberta" is one of those relatively uncomplicated cases. Relaxation and meditation had not helped Billy, a fairly prominent engineer, to reduce his ongoing anxiety. The opportunity to use the "opinion of self" intervention provides a unique short-cut to self-definition, emotion, and identity.
