the Inner Infant meeting: willed objectivity, desperate hope

The scene's saddest register-beat: Hal actively fighting his own irony in hope of being helped. He knows his reflex is to sneer, and he tries to suspend it — "wills himself to stay objective," holds off judgment, hopes "desperately for some sort of hopeful feeling to emerge." This is the ironist genuinely wanting the sincere thing to be real, doing the exact work of lowering his defenses that the book everywhere recommends. And the tragedy is that this time the object doesn't deserve it: the meeting really is kitsch, and Hal's willed openness curdles back into accurate contempt ("It seems more like some kind of cosmetic-psychology encounter thing"). The one time Hal tries to Identify instead of Compare, the material won't bear it — which is why the scene is a trap, not a conversion.