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avoidance, or denial of disconfirming information of valent schemas or prevailing assumptions lead to the ratification of decisions that at first glance seem overtly rational but in fact are often unveridical and serve as containers for highly charged, unrealistic wishes and beliefs.

This is not to say that such behavior is "pathological" as traditionally defined. In fact the reductionistic attempt to use tradional categories of clinical symptomatology misses the essential point - namely that the so called conflict free ego-sphere - that blissful land of reasonable planning and purpose beloved of classical ego psychology is on closer examination typically found to contain unveridical assumptions, valent autoplastic elements, tenous judgements and incipient behaviors that are superficially adaptive but are in fact containers for wishful thinking and denial. The infamous teleconference is a locus classicus of how thinking is shaped by internalized schemas -in this case the demand for maintenance of apparent reliability and safety - an illusion abetted by the innocent presence of the teacher in space. Another classic example, pointed out by the physicist Richard Feynman of the Rogers Commission was the belief that the successes of previous flights "proved" the reliability of the shuttle - a belief that is not only logically flawed but dangerous - a kind of mental Russian roulette.

This suggests that a dimensional rather than a categorical analysis of cognition may be useful. To sketch the outlines of such a theory: dimensions of domain, veridicality, affective embeddedness, auto-alloplasticity, and adaptiveness can be outlined. The last dimension, the issue of adaptiveness, warrants amplification. Classic psychoanalytic theory suggests that the conflict-free ego-sphere is a delimited problem solving domain, fueled by conflict-free energy. Behaviors pertinent to this sphere are assumed to be rational and adaptive. This theory in one sense echoes the rationalistic model

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