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lacked respect for the human will and the conscious mind. In conversations with him, she began to articulate her own theory of mind, based on her confidence in objective reality and her reverence for reason. She started with the concept of free will, which she defined not as freedom of decision and action, the usual definition, but as “the choice to think or not to think.” Thinking is tied to survival and is volitional, she argued; unlike animals with instincts, people must make the effort to think in order to obtain a steady supply of food, build shelter, make tools—and, eventually, create skyscrapers and trains. People can choose not to think, not to face facts, not to make rational choices; like James Taggart and the other evil characters in Atlas Shrugged, they can decide instead to wish, dream, whine, stamp their feet, or bury their heads in the sand to avoid reality. If they do so, however, they have only two remaining choices going forward: to live off the productivity of others or to die.

In light of this, she argued that psychotherapy should take aim at the removal of mental contradictions and moral defects, which result from a failure to think. Looking to the emotions—fear, elation, guilt—for information about conflicts with the world outside is foolish. “Emotions are not tools of cognition,” she liked to say. At best, they are clues to whether a person’s philosophical premises and “sense of life” are in accordance with reality or need adjustment. In 1961, she wrote that her view of human psychology was that “the head has its reasons which the heart must learn to know.”

To treat neuroses, then, ought to be as simple as recognizing and banishing unrealistic, repressed, or contradictory ideas. As for her own psychology, she claimed that she could account rationally for every emotion she had ever had, a claim more dazzling to Barbara and Nathaniel than any professor’s wall of framed degrees.

Partly as a consequence of these conversations, Branden began to construct a theory he called “the psychology of self-esteem” in which he exalted rationality, productivity, and achievement. Achievement is the most important source of a person’s pride in self, and pride in self is a requisite for independence. Books and papers on this subject would later make him well known as the father of the self-esteem movement and as a significant contributor to the development of cognitive psychology, which holds that by changing one’s thinking one can change one’s feelings and behavior.

As their friendship grew, she and Branden talked of more personal matters. He confessed that he was unsure of himself with the opposite sex. Girls had never liked him, and he, in turn, had almost always found them shallow. In Barbara he had found both intelligence and a shared love of Roarkian values. If he was looking for reassurance, he received it. She said she bet he wouldn’t even notice if a girl did like him and predicted an illustrious future for him, both as a psychologist and as a communicator of ideas. If she could make his life’s path any easier, she would. She also praised Barbara. She could see that Barbara was very intelligent, she said.

In sunlit walks around the ranch, Barbara, too, confided in the older woman, describing her mixed feelings for Nathaniel. On one hand, she said, she admired him immensely. He was brilliant and charismatic. She knew that their dazzling mentor regarded him very highly. He still wanted her. And yet she wasn’t strongly romantically or sexually drawn to him, and she couldn’t understand why not. Lately, she had been worrying that she had some kind of mind-body split. It bothered her, she said, that she was strongly attracted to other boys and had even slept with one or two. What was wrong with her? Why didn’t she love him completely? As Rand walked by her side, collecting small stones—sorting them helped her organize her thoughts about the novel, she said—for once she was unable to offer insight. She couldn’t comprehend that a girl as bright as Barbara, with Barbara’s love of the heroic, wasn’t madly, passionately,