On the basis largely of interview data, this article outlines a working model for a process psychology paradigm for the heroic rescue fantasy and contrasts a prototypical sequence therefore with corresponding sequences in antisocial, asocial, and prosocial risk-taking. It proposes that the heroic rescue fantasy emerges from the interplay between (a) neurologic anomaly affecting realistic assessment of costs, risks, and benefits associated with behavior of various sorts, (b) perpetuating as impulsivity expressed as persistent underestimation of costs and risks and perhaps supported by a condition of alexithymia or verbal deficit in cognitive functioning, interacting with (c) a persistent need for self-aggrandizement likely born of psychosocial developmental experiences, leading to (d) sensitization to interpersonal environments that provide role models for and positively reinforce prosocial risk-taking behavior, yielding to (e) the manipulative creation of an opportunity to behave in such fashion as to engender risk to others and to the self, and eventuating (f) in the enactment of a heroic rescue that prevents harm to others and thus elicits praise, admiration, adulation, and possibly formal reward. The conjunction between impulsivity expressing itself in the underestimation of costs (neurogenic or not) and need for self-aggrandizement is proposed as necessary in the heroic rescue fantasy, the manipulative creation of an opportunity to behave that engenders risk to others and to the self is proposed as the defining behavior, and a rescue that prevents harm to others is proposed as the defining criterion.As devotees of the fiction of James Thurber well remember, the heroic rescue fantasy has long served as a mainstay in droll humor. Thurber's Walter Mitty spent inordinate amounts of time daydreaming about how heroically he might, could, or would behave were a fire to erupt in an elevator shaft or a masked gunman to invade the dull precincts of the insurance company where he worked--and about the degree of affectionate gratitude that would inevitably be showered upon him by those comely lasses who were his co-workers following this display of manly virtue and who, in the absence of that display, seemed barely to notice him. So long as they remain entirely within the realm of fantasy, we universally regard such dreamy aspirations for future glory won by virtue of dauntlessly heroic behavior as innocuous enough. But Thurber's character never colluded with a masked gunman to invade an office, nor set a fire
