Beyond Self-Esteem: Discovering Your Boundless Self-Worth

The main anxieties of the child are frankly existential from the beginning. At the center of the confusion is the fact that the child has only his body. He is not yet a fully symbolic animal. He has no coin other than his body to establish himself as a loved object. Only if we understand how basic and natural this question is, can we also see why harsh and loveless training regimens are the most harmful to the child. They deprive him of his first and only secure footing and make his feel secondary to symbols.

He develops a symbolic style of achieving his sense of self without having had a secure physical sense of himself. This is why psychoanalysts have been concerned about facts that seem trivial: We can understand why Freud said that the Oedipus was universal - but again, not for his phylogenetic reasons. Rather, the very fact that there has at all been frustration, confusion between the body and symbols, in a hypersensitive affection-hungry animal, leaves an undigested residue.

How the conscience is implanted: The flexibility of the self is an achievement of rare maturity: The ability to relinquish objects, reorganize boundaries of self and ego, extending and withdrawing at will … it seems simple. Why not just do it? We cannot easily, and few can fully. The reason lies in the development of the ego itself.

Freud saw that the ego grows by putting anxiety under its control as it finds out what anxiety is for the organism, and then chooses to avoid it by building defenses that handle it. This is not happening to me; projection: Freud himself prevented us from seeing this because he was not clear about the sources of anxiety … Freud, at the very beginning of his career, set out to discover the nature of conscience, why man everywhere feels guilty, what he feels guilty about, his deep underlying motives.

Kant believed conscience was a miracle implanted by God. Freud wanted to show that it was the reflex of frustrated desire. What was the truth in this? Freud was wrong about the Oedipus complex, about the motives of the human condition. Motives were not inherent as Freud thought they were - the instincts of sexuality and destructive aggression.

Freud did not discover the universal conscience of man, but, instead, the universal mechanism of implantation of conscience. His theory of ego and anxiety laid bare the reason that the sense of conscience was so deeply rooted, even in the face of experience and aging. Dishonest control is a neurotic style of living. It shocks us to learn that our innermost sense of right and wrong is [nothing more than] the distillation of a simple learning process.

To admit that neurosis is merely a process of interference with simple animal movement, of the blocking of the forward momentum of action … But the work of Adler and Reich and more recently the extension of the work in the Gestalt psychology of Frederick Perls, has made this abundantly clear. Socialization is characterized by one fundamental and recurring fact: Some blockage is good: The child is coerced into adopting a fictional pleasure, the symbolic one that he does not understand, instead of his own authentic pleasure.

The process is insidious; traumas are not important in the causation of neurosis … The contest of power that represents the socialization of a child is not necessarily a contest of blatant power, but more generally a contest of benign and disguised power. Psychologists have put it in the simplest, most biting formula: There is another sense in which the child loses governance over himself, the polar opposite of the excessive interference: Free movement for the [mature] individual is not crippled movement, but neither is it fluid accommodation: Freedom is a sense of personal potency.

And so the mother who does not permit the child to cultivate this aegis by wisely teaching him the limits of his powers, the rights of others, the natural difficulty of experience, is preventing him from becoming an individual. In order to set up the next development, Becker now turns to consider what Freud did not achieve.

Beyond Self-Esteem: Discovering Your Boundless Self-Worth (Unabridged)

Freud thought that conscience [motivation] was laid down as early as the recesses of evolution as biological memory. Today we understand that guilt is due to the human condition, to the sense of being bound, overshadowed, feeling powerless. Guilt is understood as the sense in which the body is a drag on human freedom, on limitless ambitions of movement and expansion of the inner self. This is natural guilt. Further, as existentialists have taught us, a person can feel guilt about the blockage of his own development: If we take what is durable in the work of the two men, we can understand how simple, how inevitable, how peculiarly human and tragic, is the dispossession of man.

Becker implies that it is too early for a complete inventory, but that the general contents can be now identified: If we omit all the phylogenetic referents and all the misemphasis on the sexual symbolism, we are still left with a staggering corpus of insight into why people act the way they do. The credit to names in the Preface is surely the natural development of the mainline of this psychology.

An excellent appreciation and development is in Fromm, The Heart of Man [ It culminates the development of human social motivation and personality analysis. It leads into interaction of personality and culture [ Chapter 8], personality dynamics [ Chapter 9], cultural stage for personality plays and relative nature [ Chapter 10], universals [ Chapter 11] synthesis of universals in psychology, sociology and anthropology to form a complete science of man [ Chapter 12], possible directions for development of self and society [ Chapter 13].

Freud did not explain motives [conscience, guilt], but how they are implanted. This is the main reason Alfred Adler is still contemporary. Adler broke very early with Freud on this problem when he strongly proclaimed that the basic law of human life is the urge to self-esteem. It is the durational extension of an effective anxiety buffer.

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The qualitative feeling of self-value is the basic predicate for human action, precisely because it epitomizes the whole development of the human ego. He cannot earn parental approval or self-esteem by continuing to express himself with his body - It comes to be derived from symbols … The change is momentous.

He has become the only animal in nature who vitally depends on a symbolic constitution of his worth. When the drama records a negative image, we immediately counter with a positive one … While we are asleep the ego is not working and has no conscious control over the messages. Our deeper experience may have on record that we are really worthless, helpless, dependent, mediocre, inadequate, finite: Although the self-esteem may be central [it is confused with survival] - [1] we are dependent on others for survival, [2] the boundary between survival, status, comfort, etc.

In humanization we exchange a natural sense of worth for a symbolic one. Then we are constantly forced to harangue others to establish who we are. We no longer belong to ourselves: He is faced with anxieties of his own life and experience as well as the need to accommodate the superior powers of his trainers; and from all this to salvage his sense of superiority and confidence … He can do this by choosing a symbolic action system in which to earn his basic feeling of self-worth: The great variation in character is one of the fascinations and plagues of life: The psychoanalytic characterology is the study of efforts that the child makes to salvage an intact self-esteem from this confusion.

But the sense of right and wrong, our way of perceiving the world, our feelings for it and who we are not merely a mental matter - they are largely a total organismic matter, as Dewey saw long ago, and Frederick Perls has recently reminded us. This is what makes the study of character difficult and fascinating. Even the person himself cannot know completely what his experience and feelings mean because it is largely presymbolic and unconscious. What makes the psychoanalytic corpus so compelling from the scientific point of view is that it has mastered the general problem of character by finding the current types, outline groups, into which everyone more-or-less fits: We can rarely know the unique character a person has, but his mode of earning self-esteem is more or less identifiable in terms of the basic psychoanalytic characterology.

The cost in individual freedom. Self-esteem must be the dominant social motive of man for: What is the value of my life? This is the unique human need, the logical and inevitable result of the symbolic constitution of self-worth in an unbelievably complex animal with exquisitely sensitive and effusive emotions. Self-preservation, physico-chemical identity, pulsating body warmth, a sense of power and satisfaction in activity - all these tally up in symbolic man to the emergence of the heroic urge. Freud saw the psychic nature of these facts, and he tallied them under the label of narcissism.

It was a truly brilliant formulation. Freud saw the universality of narcissism, and revealed the clinical liabilities of it. Culture provides a heroic-action system in which individuals can realize their ambitions. This symbolic system is what we call culture. In this way the ego earns the vital self-esteem that is a buffer against anxiety: One crucial function of culture is to make self-esteem possible … Its task is to provide the individual with the conviction that he is an object of primary value in a world of meaningful action.

Status and role serve further to make behavior predictable. One of the great insights into the nature of society is that it is precisely a drama. In sociological terms, status is something that everybody has, a formalized cue. Culture has the most to gain [? Sometimes status cues can be extremely complex [you and thou, etc.

Beyond Self-Esteem: Discovering Your Boundless Self-Worth

Because there is a challenge to ego mastery and a denial of meaninglessness. It makes heroism possible. This is its function on a symbolic level. There is also the physical aspect: Culture has to provide man with safety as well as self-esteem and the area of least dependability in social life is other people. More on this later. Culture and personality neatly dovetail into one coherent picture.

If self-esteem and primary heroism is the vital need, culture provides it through the hero system. The action resulting from the provision of cues provides stability. But there is a negative aspect to these arrangements: This was seen by anthropologists such as Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict.

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Benedict even spoke of the megalomaniac and paranoid styles of cultures. The child is shaped to follow certain rules in a world which automatically follows those rules. Socialization in this sense is a kind of symbolic instinctivization which represents the same hardening of behavior as thought found among lower animals.

So people willingly propagate whole cultural systems that hold them in bondage, and since everybody plays the same hero-game, nobody can see through the farce. Since it is the avoidance of anxiety that keeps an individual bound to a certain personality, change must involve exposure to anxiety. Chapter 7 formulated the centrality of self-esteem in personality development.

Chapter 9 discusses the dynamics of self-esteem maintenance in social encounter without basis in any specific cultural system - what is universal in interpersonal dynamics. The fundamental task that every society must face is truly monumental. Individualism must be protected at their sorest point: In the social encounter each member exposes for public scrutiny and possible intolerable undermining the one thing he needs the most: With stakes of this magnitude, there is nothing routine about social life.

Each social encounter is a hallowed event. Two claims have to be met by the face ritual: Factors include deportment, dress, and bearing. These are instilled by teaching the child to have feelings attached to himself: Less obvious than the physical qualities [deportment, etc. The courtesy is the delicate handling of other selves. The love is the control of oneself so that social life can go on.

The psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan liked to use the term self-system instead of the Freudian divisions of the psyche and, for Sullivan, this self-system was largely a linguistic device. The easy handling of the verbal context of action gives the only possibility of direct exercise of control over others.

Theatrical acting is a vicarious freedom of acting in control of a situation. It demonstrates perfectly how control can be gained merely by saying the right things. By using the word ceremonial properly the individual can navigate without fear in a threatening social world. He can even ignore the true attitudes of farewells and so on. A fundamental task of culture is to constitute the individual as an object of primary value in a world of meaning.

Without this, he cannot act. What about developed trust? What if some overall meaning context is missing - as in Vietnam? As the individual exercises his creative powers in the social encounter, he forms himself into a meaningful ideational whole, receiving affirmations, banishing contradictions … On the other hand: The awkwardness of the dream.

The needs of the mass. The origin of meaning. How you see yourself determines what you can achieve. You should be comfortable with who you are and what you can do, and understand your own value. Right now, you have a set of beliefs that support the person you are, not the person you want to be. In order to be the person you want to be, you've got to tweak your belief system!

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Ernest Beckers The Birth and Death of Meaning

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