³⁶It is also possible to see the connection between frustration and threats from the opposite angle: frustration could be seen as a special case of a threat to the self. I will tentatively sketch such a theory here. Perhaps failing in a task implies a threat to one’s “self-image” that Cassell talks about, and which is related to the self-evaluation of Chapter 6. Frustration would imply that the agent’s self-image is not correct, and that it has to change its self-image to something where it is less competent than it thought. Alternatively, any frustration could be considered to imply a threat to survival in the sense that it suggests that the agent’s decision-making system is not optimal and could lead to serious problems in the future. In these ways, frustration might be reduced to a special case of the threat of intactness of the person, as in Cassell’s definition of suffering. This would be in line with the thinking prevalent in Mahayana Buddhist schools, where self is seen as the source of all desires and all suffering. However, such a definition includes terms that lack a very precise definition in the framework of this book, in particular “threat”, so further work is needed to formulate this approach in detail. (I’m grateful to Michael Gutmann for suggesting this interpretation).