All happy families, wrote Tolstoy, are happy in the same way; all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way.
The same might almost be said of individuals: for the ways of happiness are few, while the ways of misery are legion. Self-destruction comes in myriad forms, and human ingenuity seems often to be directed solely at the maximisation of personal infelicity. If I didn’t know better, I’d believe in Freud’s death instinct.
I arrive in my hospital each day thinking that I have by now heard everything: that no human folly can now surprise me, that no conduct can take me aback. I am always proved mistaken, however: for overnight someone has devised a new and improved method of securing his own downfall, as well as that of everyone around him. I meet women who love men who drag them by the hair to a window and suspend them by their ankles out of the tenth floor, and I meet men who deliberately inject themselves with HIV-infected blood so that they will henceforth be attractive to Byronic women who think that fatal illness will make them interesting. One might suppose, therefore, that I am not easy to shock, surprise or appal, but every day new horrors are exhibited to tone up my nervous system, as it were. Truly the sleep of reason calls forth monsters.
Over the past few years, the self- destructive have increased not only in number but in the intensity of their self-destruction, and they have accepted a new and fashionable explanation for their own conduct: a lack of self-esteem. They confess it coyly, as if somehow revealing an innermost secret that they have never revealed to anyone before – except, possibly, to everyone else they know who has the time and patience to listen to them. They present the supposed fact of their lack of self-esteem to their doctor as if laying before him the inestimable gift of their most intimate confidence. The doctor is flattered and repays the compliment by taking what they say seriously.
But this mention of self-esteem is only an example of psychobabble, that extraordinary abstract language that conceals what it claims to reveal. Psychobabble reduces human cognition, experience and emotion to a few bloodless abstractions: but he who would know a man (to adapt William Blake slightly) must know him in minute particulars. An alleged lack of self-esteem tells us nothing about the person who suffers it: for such a lack is plausibly compatible with all human behaviour whatsoever, from the anchorite’s retreat into a desert cave to the rankest megalomania.
When someone says that he lacks self-esteem he says it as if he were denied something that is his of right. Merely by virtue of drawing breath, each person has the right to think well of himself. Are not all men created equal, in some not-quite-specifiable metaphysical sense? And is not man the paragon of animals, the beauty of the world, like unto a god? Should we not all, then, think well of ourselves?
There are several layers to the concept of self-esteem, which is not a purely psychological notion. It has, or ought to have, a moral content or dimension: for if it is possible to have too little self-esteem, it is surely possible also to have too much. And in deciding who has too much, we have to take into account the moral qualities of the person.
Does anyone not know someone who is too full of self-esteem, who is pompous, puffed up, self-important, vainglorious, self-regarding and altogether too pleased with himself? Whose achievements or qualities are minimal, yet who seems walled around by an awareness of his own assumed superiority? And is it not the case that such inflated self-esteem is one of the most unpleasant qualities anyone can have, drawing immediate censure from almost everyone? But in saying that someone has too high an opinion of himself, we are not using the language of psychology: we are using the language of morals.
It is always possible to argue that people such as I have described are exhibiting only a brittle carapace to protect themselves from their inner vulnerability and sense of their own worthlessness, but to do so is to empty the concept of self-esteem of all empirical content whatsoever. Would there be anyone in the world of whom it could not be said that he lacked self-esteem?
In the prison in which I work I see many men who have a grossly inflated and indeed repulsive self-esteem. They are young criminals who walk with a swagger, who have frequently committed acts that have caused deep misery to others, who have fathered children without the least concern for their welfare and yet who project a self- satisfaction that is horribly at variance with their actual place in the world.
Nevertheless I am often faced with a patient who complains of lack of self-esteem. Perhaps he expects a self-esteem pill – believing that, once his self-esteem is up to scratch, his life will sort itself out of its own accord. There will be no more marital discord, no more failure at work, no more getting drunk, no more trouble with the police, no more court appearances, no more nasty letters from the bank manager or credit card companies.
The patient believes that it is the doctor who should somehow or other confer self-esteem upon him, a bit like a medal at an award ceremony; and if he fails to do so, the doctor is responsible for the future dissatisfactions of the patient. We are back in the world of Emile Coue, the French psychologist who, in the early part of this century, advised his patients to repeat: “Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better,” 20 times in the morning and 20 times in the evening. Nevertheless people continued to die. It is as if the patient lacking self-esteem believed that the facts of biography could be changed by acts of suggestion.
Reviewing such a patient’s life, it is usually clear that there are many grounds for his lack of self-esteem. Indeed by the end of the history-taking it is clear that he does not think nearly ill enough of himself, that he is far worse than he supposed; that his alleged lack of self-esteem, the problem that he has laid before the doctor, is but a ruse to disguise from himself the extent of his own worthlessness. For by claiming that he lacks self-esteem, he is claiming that he ought, or deserves, to think well of himself. As his biography makes clear, that is far from being the case.
The doctrine of self-esteem to which everyone is entitled, then, is part of the philosophy of the “real me”, that inner, Platonic (or perhaps Rousseauvian) essence that is uncorrupted by the grosser “phenomenal me”, the me that behaves selfishly, that loses its temper, is dishonest and hits women (or whatever vice it is given to). It is this concept of the uncorrupted, indeed incorruptible, inner essence that allows a man who, for example, has repeatedly beaten women and continues to do so to say, apparently in all sincerity, “It’s not me, doctor, it’s just not me.” And until the doctor has managed to bring a perfect match between the real him and the apparent, or phenomenal, him, he can continue to beat women with a clear conscience. His heart, or soul, is in the right place, because everyone’s heart or soul is in the right place.
What does one need to do to deserve self-esteem, then? Oddly enough, there is an asymmetry here. It does not follow from the fact that certain people who behave badly have too much self-esteem that people who behave well should have high self-esteem: for self-esteem (which is very different from self-respect) is almost always an unattractive quality, whatever a person’s other merits, in so far as it implies self-regard and even self-obsession. And while it is perfectly correct and salutary for people who commit disgraceful acts to feel bad about themselves – for how else are they to teach themselves to behave better in future? – feeling good about one’s own merits is likely to manifest itself as unctuous complacency, as a kind of Uriah Heep-ishness of self-satisfaction.
Many people come to me saying that they need to find themselves, on the assumption that somewhere buried deep within them, like a vein of precious ore in the Witwatersrand, there is a wonderful, exceptional, talented person trying to get out, about whom they will be able to feel good. The doctor is thus a miner in the hard rock of the personality. I sometimes astonish my patients by telling them that it is far more important that they should be able to lose themselves than that they should be able to find themselves. For it is only in losing oneself that one does find oneself.
Self-respect is an altogether more valuable and admirable quality than self-esteem, because it is other- and not self-regarding. It is a civil and social, not a narcissistic and solipsistic, quality. Walk down the main streets of any British city and you will see people with excessive self-esteem but no self-respect. They dress shabbily, for example, and in so far as they are concerned to create any impression on others, it is to warn them to treat them with what, in the language of street credibility, is known as “respect”: that is to say, not to challenge their inflated sense of their own importance in any way.
Self-respect is possible for people in all walks of life and in almost any social conditions. I have been struck by the self-respect of many people in the slums of the developing world, where to appear in clean clothes represents a considerable achievement, a triumph of the human spirit over adversity. The concept of respectability – now so derided – once performed the same function for the poor in England. Take away self-respect, and all you have is a vain whistling in the wind, in search of the chimerical and generally repulsive self-esteem.
Anyone who even asks the question of whether he has sufficient self-esteem is, ipso facto, a lost soul. Whatever answer is given, the person is in trouble, in a state of profound error and confusion. It is a sign of our increasing self-obsession, of the narrowing of our emotional, spiritual and intellectual horizons, that a concept such as self-esteem should have assumed such importance and become central to so many kinds of therapy. I recall the words of Lord Bacon (admittedly not a man entirely without ego himself), which are as true now as they were when he wrote them: “It is a poore centre of a Man’s life, Himselfe.”
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