Within the first article from The Virtue of Selfishness, I found a
suprising psychological insight by Rand: (paraphrasing)

"What [man] will consider good or evil... depends upon his standard
of value... If a man desires and pursues contradictions... he
disintegrates his consciousness; he turns his inner life into a
civil war of blind forces engaged in dark, incoherent, pointless,
meaningless conflicts."

Rand had it dead-on in terms of value-conflict: conscious
disintegraton, inner life engaged in meaningless conflict between
(literally) blind forces. However, these contradictions lay not
necessarily within one's consciousness, but rather throughout a
fragmented mind. Unfortunately, Rand was not aware that one cannot
remove contradictions in the mind without first unearthing the
conflicted fragments.

Speaking for myself and how I experienced the effects of Rand's
straight philosophy as a form of psychology: I developed a conscious
set of values, burying deeply any contradictory emotions,
perceptions, and the like. I was thus able to create a fairly
robust integrated set of values... in a small fraction of my mind.
The rest I left fragmented and did not much care to unearth. After
all, who would want to? It's a huge accomplishment to create such a
set of integrated conscious values... damned if I was going to let
my disowned aspects threaten it.

Unfortunately, I was plagued with "pointless, meaningless
conflicts." 60% of the time, I lived a life of ecstasy and fiercely
successful energy; the other 40% of the time I felt numb,
controlled, and patient for the period to pass so that I could go
back to being "me." ... my approach has since changed.

Simply put: when an individual begins to create a set of values,
those values are established only within the area of the mind that
is presently conscious; they are not universally accepted
internally. Rand understood that value systems maintain integration
or cause disintegration within the mind; but it took a true
psychologist like Dr. Branden to understand that a value system unto
itself does not automatically cause reintegration.

Christopher