" There is, furthermore, the factually hopeless enterprise of trying to measure up to the idealized image. It is hard to say whether this may not be the most potent of the factors producing hopelessness. There is no question, however, that in analysis hopelessness comes into full relief when the patient becomes aware that he is far from being the uniquely perfect person he sees in his imagination. He feels hopeless at such a time not only because he despairs of ever attaining those fantastic heights but even more because he responds to this realization with profound self-contempt, detrimental to the expectation of ever attaining anything, whether in love or in work. "

― Karen Horney , Our Inner Conflicts: A Constructive Theory of Neurosis