Hobbs is describing something more volatile than pride and more primitive than self-esteem. The need to count for something is not a vanity that discipline might correct — it is structural to *thūmos*, the organ that registers value and demands that value be witnessed. What she identifies as the "ideal image" is not ego-inflation; it is the soul's attempt to hold itself as a coherent something in a world that perpetually threatens to dissolve it into nothing.

Notice where the suffering enters. Not in the failure itself, but in the gap between the image one carries and the behavior that betrays it. Anger and self-disgust are not punishments — they are disclosures. They are *thūmos* speaking its own wound, registering that something fine was at stake and has been damaged. The soul cannot lie to itself here without cost.

And then the social dimension, which Hobbs is careful not to reduce to mere vanity: others must confirm what one holds of oneself. This is not weakness. In Homer's world, value does not exist as a private possession — it is constituted in the field between persons. The need for recognition is not a flaw in the soul's architecture; it is the architecture. Strip it, and you have not purified the soul — you have amputated one of its load-bearing walls.