Page iii The Psychology of Self-Esteem A Revolutionary Approach to Self-Understanding That Launched a New Era in Modern Psychology Nathaniel Branden Page iv Copyright © 1969 by Nathaniel Branden, Preface to the 32nd Anniversary Edition and Epilogue copyright © 2001 by Nathaniel Branden. FIRST JOSSEY-BASS EDITION PUBLISHED IN 2001. THIS BOOK WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY NASH PUBLISHING. Jossey-Bass is a registered trademark of Jossey-Bass Inc., A Wiley Company. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Sections 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, (978) 750-8400, fax (978) 750-4744. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158- 0012, (212) 850-6011, fax (212) 850-6008, e-mail: [email protected]. Jossey-Bass books and products are available through most bookstores. To contact Jossey-Bass directly, call (888) 378-2537, fax to (800) 605-2665, or visit our website at www.josseybass.com Substantial discounts on bulk quantities of Jossey-Bass books are available to corporations, professional associations, and other organizations. For details and discount information, contact the special sales department at Jossey-Bass. e-ISBN 0-7879-5868-9 This title is also available in print as ISBN 0-7879-4526-9 (pbk. alk. paper) For more information about Wiley products, visit our web site at www.Wiley.com FIRST EDITION Page v CONTENTS Preface to the 32nd Anniversary Edition vii Introduction xi Part One: The Foundations 1 1. Psychology as a Science 3 2. Man: A Living Being 17 3. Man: A Rational Being 28 4. Man: A Being of Volitional Consciousness 36 5. Emotions 63 6. Mental Health 93 Part Two: The Psychology of Self-Esteem 107 7. The Nature and Source of Self-Esteem 109 8. Pseudo-Self-Esteem 139 9. Pathological Anxiety: A Crisis of Self-Esteem 153 10. Social Metaphysics 171 11. Self-Esteem and Romantic Love 194 12. Psychotherapy 218 Epilogue: Working with Self-Esteem in Psychotherapy 251 Notes 275 Index 281 About the Author 289 Page vii PREFACE TO THE 32ND ANNIVERSARY EDITION I wrote this book during the 1960s and it was published in 1969. It is a source of immense satisfaction to have this opportunity to write a new Preface for the 32nd anniversary edition. Although I have written many books since this one, for a significant number of my readers it remains their favorite of my works. Certainly it laid the foundation for everything I wrote subsequently about self-esteem. Are there things that I would do differently if I were writing the book today? Of course. It is impossible for an author to reread a book written more than three decades ago and not feel, "Today I could do it better." However, I have chosen to leave the book in its original form—unedited and unchanged—for this edition. It has, I am convinced, an integrity, or internal logic, that would be undermined if I attempted to co-mingle it with perspectives arrived at later. This book is more philosophical than most of my subsequent writings, which I do not regret, and more moralistic, if only by implication—which I do regret. Its ethical vision is narrower than that offered in such books of mine as The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem (1995) and The Art of Living Consciously (1997). And yet people in the fields of publishing and psychology tell me repeatedly that this book has done more to awaken consciousness concerning the importance of self-esteem to human well-being than any other single work. If true, I am proud of that. I struggle to make real, at the age of seventy, that I made my first notes on self-esteem while still in my twenties and began writing this book when I was thirty-three. Wanting to offer the reader some sense of how my thinking about self-esteem has developed, I offer an Epilogue entitled Page viii "Working with Self-Esteem in Psychotherapy." A single essay cannot retrace all the steps involved in my evolving and expanding vision of the dynamics of self-esteem, but it will convey a good (if highly distilled) introduction to my more recent thinking, and it will disclose how the basic conceptual structure first presented in The Psychology of Self-Esteem still stands. To comment on one small linguistic change: in the present volume I speak of the two components of self-esteem as self-confidence and self-respect. In my later work, I speak of self-efficacy and self-respect. The reason for the change is that self-confidence is too general, too abstract, too vague. What I wanted to convey was specifically the experience of being efficacious in the face of life's challenges. I have learned what I know about self-esteem from several sources—from reasoning about human experience that is more or less available to everyone, from working with clients in psychotherapy for more than four decades and having to constantly test my ideas against the challenge of needing to achieve specific results, and from working on my own development. In The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem (which I regard as the grandchild of the present volume), I tell a number of stories about myself, about mistakes I made, and about the lessons I learned from those mistakes— all of which deepened my understanding of what strengthens self-esteem and what undermines it. It is difficult to help others grow in self-esteem if we do not understand how its dynamics operate in ourselves. One of the most important things this book makes clear is that self-esteem is not a feel-good phenomenon. Our need of it is rooted deep in our nature, and if we understand that need, we understand that it cannot be satisfied arbitrarily or capriciously by just any pursuit that might happen to attract us. Self-esteem rests on the appropriate exercise of mind, and what that means specifically is examined in the pages that follow. We will see that self- esteem, rationality, perseverance, self-responsibility, and personal integrity are all intimately related. We will also see that even though others may help us or obstruct us on the path to self-esteem, especially when we are young, no one can literally give us self-esteem. It must be generated from within. Page ix The best analogy I can think of is to physical fitness—getting in shape. Others can encourage us or teach us principles of exercise and healthy nutrition, but no one can make us a gift of being physically fit. That is a state we must achieve ourselves—through the actions and practices we cultivate. Precisely the same is true of self-esteem. We make a muscle strong by using it. That is how we make a mind strong. Aristotle taught us that we build a good character through the discipline of converting virtuous practices into habits. How this idea applies to building self-esteem, we shall shortly proceed to consider. But first we must look at the context in which the need for self-esteem arises. What is it in the nature of reality and of mind that makes self- esteem an urgent concern? This is where our inquiry begins. NATHANIEL BRANDEN LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA OCTOBER 2000 Page xi INTRODUCTION In his quest to understand the universe in which he lives, man is confronted with three fundamental facts of nature: the existence of matter, of life, and of consciousness. In response to the first of these phenomena, he developed the sciences of physics and chemistry; in response to the second, he developed the science of biology; in response to the third, he developed the science of psychology. It is notorious that, to date, the greatest advances in knowledge have been achieved in the field of physics—the least, in the field of psychology. The explanation of this difference in the comparative rates of progress lies, at least in part, in the respective challenges posed by these three sciences. In seeking to identify laws of nature, man basically is seeking to identify the principles of action exhibited by entities in their behavior: to grasp what entities do in different contexts and why. Given this task, the job of the physicist is simpler than that of the biologist: the number of variables with which he must cope in studying the action of inanimate matter, the variety of actions possible to inanimate entities, is far less than that encountered in the behavior of living organisms. But the job of the biologist is simpler than that of the psychologist: a conscious living organism such as man exhibits a complexity and variety of behavior greater by far than that exhibited by any other entity, living or nonliving. As a being who possesses the power of self-consciousness—the power of contemplating his own life and activity— man experiences a profound need for a conceptual frame of reference from which to view himself, a need for a self- intelligibility which it is the task of psychology to provide. This book is offered as a step toward the achievement of that goal. It is no part of my intention, in this context, to engage in polemics against contemporary psychology or to argue that it has Page xii failed to provide man with the self-knowledge he needs.