Note on Self-Esteem
Self-esteem is considered to be the salve for mental suffering. But it only fixes the problem and constipates the experience of selfhood.
It is a common reason people seek consultation from psychotherapists, particularly when someone says they have ‘low’ self-esteem. It is probably less common to read on an intake form or hear in a first session that one is seeking help because they suffer from too much self-esteem. In many ways, the measurement of how one esteems one’s own self seems to be the standard for general mental health and well-being in our culture. It is a powerful idea which has been able to mobilize generations of both patients and therapists to work together on this apparently self-evident idea.
It seems related to ideas such as self-efficacy, one’s valuation of oneself, an internal locus of control, or a healthy ego. But it isn’t quite these ideas; if it was, we would be describing our experiences in that way instead. I suppose my first question is why we have agreed to use the term self-esteem rather than, say, a healthy ego.
The first thing about self-esteem is that it begins with ‘self’, a notoriously strange and uncomfortably malleable term. Someone like Rudolf Carnap would certainly wince at the use of the word in as many contexts and ways as it is used today. For all of its slipperiness and strangeness, self is a very moving and universal term. You would be hard-pressed, I think, to find any theory in psychology which dispenses with the idea of the self.
The other thing about self-esteem is that it involves some kind of esteem, which is a way to say that an evaluation, or several evaluations, is operative here. There is a self and then there is the evaluation of it, the estimation of its value. From the Etymonline website, we see that valuation and reputation is associated with “esteem”, from the French word estimer, which means to estimate or to determine. To determine what? Related terms include “esteemed” and “aim”. The latter is particularly interesting, as it comes from the Latin word aestimer, which means to appraise, or determine the value of. These are all very economic ideas of estimation, which raises some interesting questions for its application to our own selves today. Is this another iteration of the great transition into homo economicus?
Crucial in these earlier links is that esteem is used as a verb, the act of determining or estimating, done by someone to something. I think this is not usually how I hear the word used in our cultural context. We use self-esteem as a noun, something that one can possess. “I think I have low self-esteem” or “good mental health is when you have high self-esteem.” Perhaps it might be better to say something like self-esteemed, which is closer to the original definition (‘esteemed’ being from 1540s, meaning “held in high regard, respected, valued”).[1] It is something that is done and over with, like financing a house.
Self-esteem, then, is something one can have (or, at least, that is how it is talked about) or not have. Something that others can have, but which one doesn’t. But what are the things that make up self-esteem? The qualities that, if present, are a sure sign that a person has it? If it isn’t a verb, then we should be able to fix this concept in space and time and give a fairly good description of it. And if we often use other people as a measuring stick to compare our own feelings then our description should probably be flexible enough to fit around others as well.
Having and Not Having
Self-esteem begins with the self and the kind of attention we give it. But first we have to assume that there is a self to value in some way or other. However, there doesn’t appear to be so much a fixed and stable self as there are different aspects or dynamics which are felt to be ‘the self’. For instance, Mark Epstein writes, in Thoughts Without a Thinker, that Buddhist psychology proposes that the self is a kind of fixation on an idea, ultimately illusory and temporal but very convincing. The self, for Epstein, is a very powerful and moving fiction. Buddhist practice is one way (among others) available to us to start to take a different perspective on this particular fiction if it causes us too much trouble. The threat is that we spend too much time being occupied by the self, and this causes a great deal of suffering.
Don Carveth says something similar in a lecture on narcissism.[2] One of the aims of psychoanalysis, he tells us — as well as of Christianity — is the overcoming and forgetting of the self and opening up the capacity to care for and love others. The self and our investment in it, he claims, is the affliction called neurosis.
No matter how transient, incomplete, or fictional the idea of the self is, it is very powerful for most people. It is the primary concern of those who seek therapeutic treatment in any form. Seeking to rid oneself of the self or try to forget about it more is not high on the list for those who want to get some emotional relief.
For many of these people, I suspect, they are bumping up against their superego, that nasty and brutish part of themselves whose goal is to limit, fix and fixate, tell off, compare, and so on. The superego also being a construct like the ‘self’ — very moving but ultimately fictional — it is partly responsible for the very idea of the self!
If we think about the self as something which is, or that which one has, it is easy to see how self-esteem may come about: one either has a self that is worth esteeming and therefore one has self-esteem, or one does not. The latter is the message of the superego and of depression. Of course, esteem also comes from an evaluating point of view. The historical meaning of the term, we learned, is related to aim, valuing, and esteeming (the value of something). Those all require a subject and an object, or a person and a thing. A person may value a house, aim at a target, and so on. But this puts self-esteem in an awkward position. Who is being evaluated, and who is esteeming? And if there are two separate ‘parts’ within the same person, why is the one being evaluated always found to be short of the measure? If both sides are within an individual, it is a rather odd game we play with ourselves.
It’s an especially strange game when you think about winning and losing. Who wins, and who loses? And what does that party win or lose? The game of self-esteem and our internal dialogue surrounding it seems to only produce losers, at least in my view. It isn’t typically the people who are confident and self-assured that play the game as severely as the rest of us mortals. So, what might one expect if one engages in such play with the internal evaluator?
The Internal Evaluator and Morality
Freud, of course, gave the internal evaluator a name: the superego, or the ego ideal. It is the part of the self, or the dimension of the self, which is responsible for criticizing and limiting the rest of the self. Don Carveth, in his book The Still Small Voice, differentiates conscience from superego, so that we can try to think about what life might be like without one without losing the benefits of the other. Conscience, claims Carveth, is “the desire to nurture others as we have been nurtured.” It is preoedipal, which is important here, because the superego is an oedipal structure, one outcome — among others — of the drama of the childhood Oedipus Complex.
Conscience is, according to Carveth, an identification with the maternal function, that internalized experience we have which is concerned with care, repair, and belonging. It is warm, but not impotent, for it is also responsible for producing dread, anxiety, and eventually, the oedipal drama itself.
Perhaps another way to put what people want to say when they report having low self-esteem is that the volume of their superego is louder than that of their conscience. Adam Phillips says beautifully in his talk Against Self Criticism that the superego is boring, uninteresting, and cruel. So why do we believe it? Having low self-esteem can be described as being especially convinced of the cruel and uninteresting superego, or ‘negative self-talk’ in cognitive terms.
A cognitive approach will indeed be to challenge these thoughts. Find out if they’re really true, if they’re saying something that stands up to scrutiny, both about yourself and the world. If you tell yourself that you’re a loser or a dolt because you haven’t been able to make friends in the new city you’ve moved to, you might ask yourself if four months is a reasonable amount of time to make friends; or if you’re entirely a loser or doltish because of this one very particular area of struggling. If mindfulness interests you, you might practice lovingkindness meditation every day. I think these are all very fine and very useful things to do when you encounter your own superego’s nasty onslaught. But the question, for me, remains unanswered of why it’s so easy for some people to fall prey to the sales pitch of their superego.
Does feeling bad about oneself come first, and self-lacerations are ways to justify it? Or do we lacerate ourselves and then feel bad as a result? Either way, they almost always go hand in hand. The formation of the ways that we talk to (and believe the way that we talk to) ourselves might be useful here.
As I mentioned, I believe the problems of low self-esteem ultimately come from the superego. And the superego is produced during the oedipal drama. It is easy to assume from some of Freud’s writings on the topic that the superego is the identification with the father in an effort to secure the mother’s love. And when that project fails, we’re simply left with the old habit of our old man’s superego.
But in Twenty-First Century Psychoanalysis, Tom Svolos points to something else happening in its formation: “… at the end of the story, the Father never lives up to this Real Father. The Father is not the Imaginary phallus for the mother either. He is fallen as well — fallen from some ideal. And that Ideal, which is the origin of the superego, is something regarding which the child reproaches not only itself, but also the Father — for failing. And, for Lacan, this is linked to hatred, the most basic hatred, of myself and of this Imaginary Father, and further for God himself, for handling this all so badly…”
In this reading, it isn’t that we simply identify directly with the father in order to get the mother. What happens first, with the child as witness, is that the father himself cannot identify with ‘the Imaginary phallus’ which will finally grant him complete access to the mother and her enigmatic desire. The falling out — in a rather Biblical sense, I should say — of one version of the father from the other then creates all kinds of feelings like hatred. And it makes the child (by now soon entering adolescence) quite fed up with everyone in charge! First the Father, then even God, have managed royally to make a mess of everything. But — and this is crucial — that doesn’t stop the child from holding onto the ideal that both God and the father fell from: and this is the site of the superego. The ideal which is quickly uprooted from any actual interpersonal drama is identified with, and it becomes this floating talking head, criticizing us, pointing out all the ways that we, too, have fallen. Unfortunately, it remembers the hatred the child once felt towards the failed father, and the humiliation inherent in the paternal relationship. Perhaps this is why, as people get older, they watch sometimes with horror and frustration at their aging and frail parents, seeing all of their faults in the broad daylight. Once, after my grandfather passed, my mother said to me, “I think it’s more difficult on the grandchildren. For us, the idealization has already fallen away, and we were prepared for this.”
The ‘handling this all so badly’ that we resent in our fathers is internalized, identified with. People who claim to have low or poor self-esteem could also say of themselves that they tend to handle things very badly. But compared to who? Who is handling these things well? And is the person referring to the actual situation they profess to be handling badly or is it a stand-in for the original failure of the father and the domain of the superego? Lacan said somewhere that neurosis starts three generations back.
If it this is the case — that the ‘real situation’ actually lies elsewhere (at the failure of the father) and the current situation ‘handled poorly’ is only a substitute — then cognitive-behavioral therapy might not be so far off the mark with its idea that one of the ways to help out with low self-esteem is to make sure we’re identifying the correct or accurate situation. The way that psychoanalysis deals with this problem is to continually confront and point out the lack in the father to loosen up the grip of its sway over the patient in order to make more room for their own evaluations — for conscience.
Rumination, Conscience, and Desire
Low self-esteem is found everywhere. It crawls around our planet like a new plague. But very low self-esteem — a crippling version of it — is found mostly in depression. In some sense depression could be seen as a relentlessly critical autobiographical process. The relentless part of it is often called rumination, the mulling over and fixation on a few phrases over and over and over.
As Adam Phillips points out in Unforbidden Pleasures, one of the great comforts of self-criticism (and of rumination) is to give people a sense of certainty, a closed set of outcomes from any future situation or interpretation of a past situation. The process of rumination is painful, but it does have its benefits — hence why so many people are drawn to it, unconsciously or not.
One of the things we want regarding the self is certainty and constancy. But every other year another philosopher, neuroscientist, or other thinker reminds us of this fallacy: that self-certainty is a myth.
In some sense, then, rumination is the support for self-esteem: it ensures that we buy into a single reading of ourselves, however painful, boring, or inconvenient. Sometimes, I think we might be better off getting rid of the whole idea of self-esteem altogether. Typically, the move from low self-esteem is to want higher or better self-esteem. Does that just mean better or more positive ruminations? If that’s the case, are we still not opting to close ourselves off to ourselves? Any kind of rumination entraps us, entangles desire, and constipates conscience, which requires room to be uncertain to be truly conscience.
Depression is another way of saying that one’s desire has left the world, retreated to somewhere inside of us and hides away — it has shriveled up to almost nothing. And it is rumination which is the voice of this. The superego (the fallen ideal of the father) is excellent at snuffing out desire, interest, and curiosity. And of this uncomfortable dialogue between the two (desire and the superego), we get rumination, reminding us why and how to be obedient to the endless demands we have put upon ourselves.
I began with the curious idea that self-esteem is something one can have, that it is a fixed entity which is present or absent. Against the etymology of ‘esteem’ — which has an active, evaluating, in short, verb-like quality — our popular usage of this idea is a noun. However, I am not so sure this is the best way of thinking about or talking about self-esteem. It’s made up of how we talk to ourselves, in which we are both the active speaker and the passive recipient, and how our desire and conscience interact with our superego.
Ultimately, I find the idea to be clunky when used in isolation or as a possession. I think that it should be elaborated and explored and even deconstructed. It, like other psychological ideas, tends to collapse the active (and passive) parts of ourselves into one homogenous part: self-esteem.
[1] https://www.etymonline.com/word/esteem
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGxS_5A46_4&ab_channel=DonCarveth
