Honoring the Self Read online

  AN ESSENTIAL MESSAGE FOR OUR TIME …

  “Profound and practical,” comments world-renowned family therapist VIRGINIA SATIR.

  “Nathaniel Branden has the courage to make us look at truths about self-esteem, ego, pride and heroism that we have tended to disown in recent decades. This provocative book has an important message for our time.” GEORGE LEONARD, author of The Transformation and Education and Ecstasy.

  “A very important book with a very important message.” KEN WILBER, author of Up from Eden.

  “Reading it was like sitting down to a banquetful of ideas—a feast of soul-satisfying thoughts that fed our lives on many levels, both personally and professionally.” ADELE FABER and ELAINE MAZLISH, authors of Liberated Parents, Liberated Children.

  “Much wisdom and clinical insight.” BOOKLIST

  “Many worthwhile lessons here.” PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

  “Branden embodies the courage essential to self-esteem.” MARILYN FERGUSON, author of The Aquarian Conspiracy.

  A highly innovative theorist in the field of self-esteem and personal transformation, Nathaniel Branden is Executive Director of The Branden Institute for Self-Esteem, a counseling center in Los Angeles, California. His bestselling books, The Psychology of Self-Esteem and The Psychology of Romantic Love were trailblazers that have acquired the status of classics. Now he goes beyond them in his new, climactic work, HONORING THE SELF.

  Bantam Books by Nathaniel Branden

  Ask your bookseller for the books you have missed.

  HONORING THE SELF

  HOW TO RAISE YOUR SELF-ESTEEM

  THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-ESTEEM

  THE SIX PILLARS OF SELF-ESTEEM

  This edition contains the complete text of the original hardcover edition.

  NOT ONE WORD HAS BEEN OMITTED.

  HONORING THE SELF: SELF-ESTEEM AND PERSONAL TRANSFORMATION

  A Bantam Book / published by arrangement with J. P. Tarcher, Inc.

  PUBLISHING HISTORY

  J. P. Tarcher edition published March 1983

  Bantam edition / September 1985

  All rights reserved

  Copyright © 1983 by Nathaniel Branden.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  For information address: Jeremy P. Tarcher, Inc. 9110 Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90069.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-79040-8

  Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Random House, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words “Bantam Books” and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Random House, Inc., New York, New York.

  v3.1

  To Devers Branden

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  I The Dynamics of Self-Esteem

  1. Self-Esteem in Human Life

  2. The Need for Self-Esteem

  3. Self-Esteem and Child-Parent Relationships

  4. Generating Positive Self-Esteem

  5. The Problem of Guilt

  6. Motivation by Fear

  7. Self-Esteem, Work, and Love

  II The Struggle for Individuation

  8. Evolving Toward Autonomy

  9. The Problem of Self-Alienation

  10. The Art of Being

  11. Death Anxiety

  III Egoism

  12. Rational Selfishness

  13. Self-Sacrifice

  14. Individualism and the Free Society

  15. Self-Esteem and Beyond

  Bibliography

  About the Author

  Recommendations for Further Study

  Acknowledgments

  My thanks to my publisher, Jeremy Tarcher, for his enthusiasm for this project since its inception, as well as for our discussions concerning the personal meaning, to him, of “honoring the self,” which always sent me back to my desk inspired.

  My appreciation and deeply felt regard for the skill of my superb editor, Janice Gallagher, whose suggestions, feedback, and ruthless willingness to drive me past exasperation, always in the best interests of the book, contributed so much to the ultimate outcome.

  My thanks to Ken Wilber for our illuminating discussions concerning the perspective of transpersonal psychology.

  And finally, my deepest gratitude to my wife, Devers, to whom this book is dedicated—because of her unfailing emotional support during the writing, because of the many valuable psychological and literary suggestions she offered, and most of all because she embodies that attitude toward life I have loved, admired, and wanted to celebrate in my work, as long as I can remember.

  Introduction

  Of all the judgments that we pass in life, none is as important as the one we pass on ourselves, for that judgment touches the very center of our existence.

  We stand in the midst of an almost infinite network of relationships: to other people, to things, to the universe. And yet, at three o’clock in the morning, when we are alone with ourselves, we are aware that the most intimate and powerful of all relationships and the one we can never escape is the relationship to ourselves. No significant aspect of our thinking, motivation, feelings, or behavior is unaffected by our self-evaluation. We are organisms who are not only conscious but self-conscious. That is our glory and, at times, our burden.

  We monitor, assess, and question ourselves in a way possible to no other species. We ask, Who am I? What do I want? Where am I going? What is my purpose in life?

  Is my behavior appropriate to this purpose? Am I proud or ashamed of my choices and actions? Am I happy or unhappy to be who I am?

  We have the ability to ask such questions, and we have the ability to run from them. But the questions are always there, waiting for our response, even if we choose to pretend they do not exist or do not concern us. They are there when we come home after a day of frenetic activity at work, when we come home from a party, the arms of a lover, a political rally, a charitable function, a religious encounter.

  This book will be concerned, then, with the ultimate human encounter: the relationship of the “I” to the “me,” of the ego to the self. The issues entailed by this encounter reach into and affect virtually every significant human experience—from the level of our self-esteem, to the kind of person we are likely to fall in love with, to the ambitions and life goals we are likely to set ourselves, to our most intimately personal sense of what it means to be a human being.

  At each step of the way, we shall confront some form of the question, Shall I honor or shall I betray the self? Not that we necessarily identify the issue in these terms; in fact, we rarely do, often preferring not to know the nature of the choice we are making. But in the natural course of our development, we inevitably face a variety of questions that bear on the same ultimate alternatives: Do I belong to myself or to others? Is the primary purpose of my self the pursuit of my own happiness and the fulfillment of my own positive potentialities, or is it compliance with the wants and expectations of others? Do I live by my own vision of things or by the vision of others? Is my basic concern with my own approval or with the approval of others? Am I to rely chiefly on my own mind or on the minds of my parents or teachers, leaders or guru?

  Such questions are not only psychological, they are also philosophical and, more specifically, ethical. Psychology and ethics are intimately interrelated fields, although neither psychologists nor moralists h
ave always been eager to acknowledge the connection. This book is written at the interface of the two disciplines.

  How we relate to our selves affects how we relate to others, to the world around us, to the visible and invisible universe that constitutes our ultimate context—just as how we relate to others and to the world affects how we relate to our selves. But we begin with the self and we shall conclude with the self, and why this is so should be clear by the time we arrive at the end of our road.

  In a world in which selflessness is commonly regarded as a synonym of virtue and selfishness a synonym of evil—and in which the presumed goal of spiritual evolution is self-transcendence—a book entitled Honoring the Self may sound strange, even a bit disorienting.

  This volume is grounded in the recognition that self-esteem and personal autonomy are indispensable conditions of human well-being. Its focus is the exploration and illumination of the meaning of these states and of the conditions of their realization; that goal is the guiding principle of all the chapters that follow.

  In the course of our analysis, we shall need to examine the meaning not only of self, self-esteem, and autonomy, but also of such ideas as self-concept, self-actualization, selfishness, self-alienation, self-sacrifice, self-transcendence, ego, identity, individualism, and individuation. Our discussion will be set against a consideration of the various forces in our culture—familial, educational, religious, ethical, social—that subvert the evolution of self and self-esteem and foster self-disowning, self-alienation, and destructiveness of life. I propose to demonstrate that not selfishness but absence of self is the root of most of our evils, that selflessness is our greatest personal, interpersonal, and social danger and has been so throughout most of our history.

  In short, I shall invite the reader to reexamine some of our most prevalent beliefs about ego, selfishness, goodness—and human survival.

  While I will need the entire book to develop fully what I mean by “honoring the self,” I offer a brief statement of its essence here.

  The first act of honoring the self is the assertion of consciousness: the choice to think, to be aware, to send the searchlight of consciousness outward toward the world and inward toward our own being. To default on this effort is to default on the self at the most basic level.

  To honor the self is to be willing to think independently, to live by our own mind, and to have the courage of our own perceptions and judgments.

  To honor the self is to be willing to know not only what we think but also what we feel, what we want, need, desire, suffer over, are frightened or angered by—and to accept our right to experience such feelings. The opposite of this attitude is denial, disowning, repression—self-repudiation.

  To honor the self is to preserve an attitude of self-acceptance—which means to accept what we are, without self-oppression or self-castigation, without any pretense about the truth of our own being, pretense aimed at deceiving either ourselves or anyone else.

  To honor the self is to live authentically, to speak and act from our innermost convictions and feelings.

  To honor the self is to refuse to accept unearned guilt and to do our best to correct such guilt as we may have earned.

  To honor the self is to be committed to our right to exist, which proceeds from the knowledge that our life does not belong to others and that we are not here on earth to live up to someone else’s expectations. To many people, this is a terrifying responsibility.

  To honor the self is to be in love with our own life, in love with our possibilities for growth and for experiencing joy, in love with the process of discovering and exploring our distinctively human potentialities.

  Thus we can begin to see that to honor the self is to practice selfishness in the highest, noblest, and least understood sense of that word. And this, I shall argue, requires enormous independence, courage, and integrity.

  In contrast to the state of being I have just described, the two most striking characteristics of men and women who seek psychotherapy are a deficiency of self-esteem and a condition of self-alienation. In some crucial ways they do not feel appropriate to life and to its requirements, and they lack adequate contact with the world within, with their needs, wants, feelings, thoughts, values, and potentialities. Thus diminished in consciousness, they are estranged from their proper human estate. Large areas of the self lie undiscovered, unexpressed, unlived. They are sleepwalkers through their own existence.

  But this group is hardly a breed distinct from the rest of humanity. They are, in fact, a mirror reflecting the predicament of most individuals, to varying degrees. No study has ever suggested that people in therapy are, on the average, more troubled or demoralized than people who are not in therapy. Rather, they tend to be distinguished by the fact that they have chosen to confront the problems of poor self-esteem and inadequate contact with the self, and they thereby offer us an opportunity to learn a great deal about the psychological condition of the general population.

  I am a psychotherapist, and the context in which I write is that intimate arena where it is always three o’clock in the morning, where the practical effects of theories, ideologies, family and social environments, educational systems and political structures are ultimately felt: the private experience of the individual human being struggling to create a meaningful and fulfilling existence.

  In contrast to the conventional perspective of psychotherapy, however, which tends to view aspects of this struggle in terms of illness or disease and to see human beings as more or less helpless pawns manipulated by forces outside their control, I see the endeavor as potentially heroic. It contains all the elements of great myth or great drama, from the start along the path to self-actualization, which entails breaking free of the gravitational pull of mother, father, and family, to the adventures, crises, anxieties, rites of passage, victories, and defeats that are all part of the growth process, and on to the heights to be climbed, the depths to be explored, the adversaries to be confronted in the world and in the psyche itself—and, intrinsic to the drama from the beginning, the terrible and exhilarating uncertainty concerning the ultimate outcome of the story.

  We shall have many occasions to see the ways in which the challenge to honor the self calls on the heroic possibilities of our nature—on the will to think, to understand, to remain true to our understanding, to struggle, to endure, to persevere, and to remain open and responsive to life, sometimes in the face of dread, despair, confusion, and loneliness.

  That the concepts of honoring the self and self-esteem are intimately related is obvious almost from the words themselves. The nature of this relationship is explored in part one. Here I address myself to the role of self-esteem in human life, to the conditions on which positive self-esteem depends, and to the many ways in which our life is affected by the nature of our self-appraisal.

  Virtually all psychologists recognize that there is some connection between the degree of a person’s self-esteem and the degree of his or her overall mental well-being, just as there is some connection between the condition of a person’s self-esteem and his or her behavior in work and human relationships. And yet there has been surprisingly little exploration into this area. It has been a relatively neglected field of study. I cannot help but feel that the discussion that follows is long overdue, and one of my hopes is that it will serve as a springboard for the further explorations of others.

  I first wrote about this subject in The Psychology of Self-Esteem, and I developed some of the themes in The Disowned Self. But it is now more than a decade since these books were published. The present work, based on my studies of the past thirteen years, represents a new examination of the role of self-esteem in human development, as well as a fresh treatment of the issues of self and the world, self and society, self in the cosmos. Inevitably I have had to retrace some of the steps covered in the previous books. I have allowed myself to borrow from or paraphrase material from these books, without burdening the present work with unnecessary references or quotati
on marks.

  I approach the twin themes of honoring the self and self-esteem from another angle in part two, where I address myself to the process by which an individual evolves, or fails to evolve, toward increasing autonomy and individuation. Here, I focus on the process of self-actualization from a perspective that is predominantly developmental—as contrasted with part one, in which the focus is predominantly the here and now. In this section I also move into the problem of self-alienation. I discuss how the less than autonomous individual—the self-alienated man or woman—can move toward increasing wholeness, rediscovering and bringing into harmony previously dissociated aspects of the self.

  In part three I shift to the ethical perspective—the role of values in human life and the ways in which the moral precepts we accept can contribute to or diminish self-esteem and personal evolution. In this section I deal with the morality of honoring the self. I conclude this discussion by addressing myself to the spiritual, or transpersonal, perspective; examining the view that holds self-transcendence to be the ultimate goal of human evolution. Should we strive to go “beyond ego”? Is the self merely a scaffolding to be discarded at a higher stage of our development? Is the disappearance of self the final triumph of maturity?

  Throughout the book, in a variety of ways and contexts, I shall be concerned with the process of change and with what we ourselves can do to facilitate rising to higher levels of self-esteem, autonomy, and an integrated sense of self.

  My goals in this work, then, are as follows: to demonstrate, specifically and concretely, what honoring the self means and to show the overwhelming importance of this issue to human life and well-being; to examine the kinds of behaviors by which self is honored or betrayed; to develop a deeper understanding of the meaning of self-esteem and its potency as a force in determining the course of our existence; to show on what the attainment of positive self-esteem depends; to explore the meanings of autonomy and individuation and the path to their realization; to point the way out of the widespread problem of self-alienation; to illuminate the morality of honoring the self and to integrate the psychology of self-esteem with an ethics of rational or enlightened self-interest; and, finally, to show that ego, properly understood, is not an obstacle to spiritual fulfillment but rather that without which no fulfillment is possible.