by whichthe US tries to deal with mental care, which prevents them from engaging in theindispensable verbal communication ofpainful feelings. This kind of environment that opposes itself to thenecessary processing of unpleasant experiences is beautifully illustrated in asong made immortal by the voice of Nat King Cole:Pretend youre happy when youre blue:It isnt very hard to do.No it isnt hard: its stupid!The denouncement of this transcendental foolishness has had some culminatingmoments in Western literature. In the 18th century, it was mocked byVoltaire in Candide. One centurylater, Nietzsche virulently railed against it:To attempt the destruction of our passions is the height of folly.[6]Less than one hundred years later,the deplorable consequences of the obligation to be happy the whole time werealso strikingly described in Huxleys BraveNew World and replicated in Orwells 1984.However, the Americans do not seemto have read, or taken seriously, Orwell, Huxley, Nietzsche, Freud or Voltaire.They have read and taken Napoleon Hill seriously. In 1937, Hill, a chronic failure who onlymanaged to escape from his misfortunes by advising others to pretend they werewell, published his Think and Grow Rich,inaugurating to use an expression of Diogo Mainardis[7] the macroscopic con of Pretending Psychology. Hill proposed, as an infallible formula for wellbeing, success andpersonal growth, that we block our conscious access to states such as sadness,discouragement, distress, and so on, considered negative, and that wesimultaneously work to induce ourselves into states such as optimism, happiness,confidence, and so on, considered positive.[8] Tosum up, Hill proposed that his readers transform themselves into a vast legionof Candides, the silly disciple of Pangloss, the philosopher of unconditionaloptimism ridiculed by Voltaire. And whenone of these Candides, tired of saying that everything is all the time OK,picks up a gun and goes on a shooting spree to express with actions the resentment that he has not been allowed toexpress with words, PretendingPsychology is obviously unable to understand why this happens! Those who are acquainted with theominous effects of regularly blocking anykind of emotion either positive or negative from verbalexpression will not be at all surprised that small frustrations build up untilthey become mountains of resentment, all too often leading to completelyirrational explosions of hate. If, asNietzsche pointed out, to attempt thedestruction of our passions is the height of folly, American PretendingPsychology has taken this folly to macroscopic proportions. In his sagatious book, Conversation, Theodore Zeldin surely had at the back of his mindthe insidious transformation of this typically unhealthy American way ofdealing with distress into a global disease when he perceptively observed: Today,the revolution that we need lies in the way we speak about failure.[9]In fact, Clintons comment Thereare a lot of other kids out there who are building up resentment and are beyondour reach although accurate in its identification of an accumulation ofresentment, contains a big mistake: tosay that this large number of other kids are outside our reach. In fact, itis not these children who are outside the reach of American culture it isAmerican culture that is beyond the reach of these kids, who must haverepeatedly tried in vain to make their negative feelings heard by it. How