When a person shifts the “center of gravity” of his personality to the ideal self, he not only exalts himself; in the inevitably wrong perspective, his present self appears before him: he himself, as he is at the present moment, his body, his consciousness, healthy and neurotic. The exalted self becomes not only a ghost after which he is chased, it becomes a measure by which his present being is measured. Moreover, this present being, viewed from the point of view of God-like perfection, appears so nondescript that he cannot but despise him.