Self-Esteem

What is Self-Esteem?

[Page 695]Psychologist William James, in his 1890 work Principles of Psychology, provides a broad definition for the concept of self-esteem as simply being a person's evaluation of himself or herself. In sum, high self-esteem is a good self-evaluation and low self-esteem is a poor self-evaluation, but that may be too simple. Self-esteem, generally speaking, is a subjective concept because it strongly relates to feelings and perceptions of an individual's self-worth imposed by the self and others. Objectively, self-esteem can be related to how one is evaluated by the self or others in the performance of a particular skill or talent (e.g., a good public speaker + great audience acceptance = high self-esteem versus a poor public speaker + audience rejection = low self-esteem). The meaning of self-esteem can be divided into two components, group and personal, which adds to its complexity of meaning.

The component of group self-esteem refers to how an individual feels about group membership and his or her perceived role and acceptance by the group (e.g., racial or ethnic), and personal self-esteem refers to how an individual feels about himself or herself comprehensively as an individual without regard for group or the approval of others. Trends in the study of self-esteem have gone through three phasesthat of human instinct, human need, and motivationto its current state of wanting to know the reasons why humans are motivated to maintain high levels of self-esteem.

Self-esteem seen as an innate or instinctual concept left many questions unanswered, and many researchers quickly found this perspective useless and moved to the need phase made popular by Abraham Maslow and others. Esteem is generally represented as the fourth level on Maslow's hierarchy of needs and refers to a person's concept of self-worth and need to belong. This need includes such complex and interrelated variables as self-esteem, confidence, achievement, respect of others, and respect by others. Without the esteem need fulfilled, individuals will not reach self-actualization and cannot grow until the esteem need has been fulfilled.

In 1969, however, Nathaniel Branden suggested two additional elements when defining self-esteem: first, the ability to cope with the challenges of life, and second, an individual is always worthy of happiness. This view considered that the esteem need would always be met. Branden also believed that the six elements or pillars for healthy self-esteem were (1) living consciouslybe aware of what is going on in the world and be willing to understand; (2) self-acceptancebe willing to take ownership for personal thoughts, feelings, and actions; (3) self-responsibilitybe part of the solution rather than the problem and each individual is responsible for his or her choices in life; (4) self-assertivenessbe authentic when dealing with others and value humanity even in difficult situations; (5) living purposefullybe able to identify, plan, and organize to reach short-term and long-term goals; and (6) personal integritybe one who has the ability to keep his or her word (e.g., do what you say and say what you mean).

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