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Now many crises in people__ lives occur because the hero role that they__e assumed for one situation or set of situations no longer applies to some new situation that comes up, or__he same thing in effect__ecause they haven__ the imagination to distort the new situation to fit their old role. This happens to parents, for instance, when their children grow older, and to lovers when one of them begins to dislike the other. If the new situation is too overpowering to ignore, and they can__ find a mask to meet it with, they may become schizophrenic__ last-resort mask__r simply shattered. All questions of integrity involve this consideration, because a man__ integrity consists in being faithful to the script he__ written for himself. ____e said you__e too unstable to play any one part all the time__ou__e also too unimaginative__o for you these crises had better be met by changing scripts as often as necessary. This should come naturally to you; the important thing for you is to realize what you__e doing so you won__ get caught without a script, or with the wrong script in a given situation. You did quite well, for example, for a beginner, to walk in here so confidently and almost arrogantly a while ago, and assign me the role of a quack. But you must be able to change masks at once if by some means or other I__ able to make the one you walked in with untenable. Perhaps____ just suggesting an offhand possibility__ou could change to thinking of me as The Sagacious Old Mentor, a kind of Machiavellian Nestor, say, and yourself as The Ingenuous But Promising Young Protégé, a young Alexander, who someday will put all these teachings into practice and far outshine the master. Do you get the idea? Or__his is repugnant, but it could be used as a last resort__he Silently Indignant Young Man, who tolerates the ravings of a Senile Crank but who will leave this house unsullied by them. I call this repugnant because if you ever used it you__ cut yourself off from much that you haven__ learned yet. __t__ extremely important that you learn to assume these masks wholeheartedly. Don__ think there__ anything behind them: ego means I, and I means ego, and the ego by definition is a mask. Where there__ no ego__his is you on the bench__here__ no I. If you sometimes have the feeling that your mask is insincere__mpossible word!__t__ only because one of your masks is incompatible with another. You mustn__ put on two at a time. There__ a source of conflict, and conflict between masks, like absence of masks, is a source of immobility. The more sharply you can dramatize your situation, and define your own role and everybody else__ role, the safer you__l be. It doesn__ matter in Mythotherapy for paralytics whether your role is major or minor, as long as it__ clearly conceived, but in the nature of things it__l normally be major. Now say something.