I've recently read Compassion and Self-Hate by Theodore Ruben, which builds on Karen Horney's idea that people who were abused, neglected, or overly manipulated as children are apt to conclude that being a human wasn't good enough, and then they invent inhuman standards (always right, always victorious, the perfect martyr, etc.) in the hopes that they can find a way to be good enough. I'll add that self-hatred can lead to overreacting to ideals from fiction. I found the book to be a very specific salve to some damage I'd picked up from Ayn Rand. Her preferred characters are very passionate and energetic, and I'm not like that. I hadn't realized how much my concern with the mismatch was (and probably still is) haunting me. I described the book to a friend, and that made him realize he was haunted by Heinlein characters, and not in a good way. Ruben addresses self-hatred as a semi-autonomous and very debilitating pattern, with compassion towards oneself as a not fully comprehensible or optimizable system as the solution. Will's "being flawless along a set of dimensions the designation of which as desirable is itself considered flawless reasoning" strikes me as one of those inhuman standards.