Self-Esteem, and Who We Are & What We Are!

The Peripatetic Philosopher Speaks

SELF-ESTEEM, AND WHO WE ARE & WHAT WE ARE!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© February 13, 2005

PREAMBLE

An emailer finds my little missives generate more questions than they answer, which, incidentally, is precisely their objective, that is, to make you think and decide for yourself what the answers are in your own life.

The emailer reminds me that I say people take themselves too seriously, but life not seriously enough. I stand by that premise. He goes on, “Was that not about humility, or is it about false modesty?” Then he answers himself, “Perhaps it is more a reality check – I’m good at this, but not good at that, and know it.” He is processing my missive in terms of his perceptions, which is all any writer can ask.

Then he continues. “Did you mean we should have a sense of humor about ourselves?” Then he shifts gears and suggests I was hard on a recent correspondent. “He didn’t want you to put him down, and I suspect by your comment he reaped what he feared. The safe path for him proved dangerous, and he showed respect and fear of your intellect, like oops I did it!” Later it will be apparent that both this writer and the reader he is referring to are revealing the divided self that has become a product of our culture, between who we are and what we are, or between our genetic code and actually experience.

To another emailer, my directness is a bromide. She says, “Your comments amount to lessons learned for me that have genuine worth.” She continues, “You present yourself honestly and let the chips fall where they may.” Then she, too, makes an abrupt change. “I have a temperamental seventeen-year-old son who has an image problem.”

Then the ambivalence kicks in. She agrees with me intellectually that self-esteem is a contentious construct that actually masks real issues, but emotionally she confesses she is addicted to the concept. She contends her son’s self-image is all wrong, but admits self-esteem is almost a religion with her and her friends despite her personal reservations about it. “I can always find a cadre of support for my obsession. We all want to believe that with self-esteem all problems are dissolved.”

Commitment to self-esteem, however, is not helping her son, “whose self-image is nothing but wrong and so he gets that message directly or indirectly in the course of the day.” I sense that people are picking on him or putting him down, or ignoring him. Yet, and this is the cruncher, he expects praise from his parents even if it is not due, and no criticism even when it is. The son is frustrated and confused; the parents are exhausted and out of apparent options. The triangular situation seldom finds them on the same page to deal with this conundrum. It is not a new problem and it is not likely to soon go away. It might help, however, to explore the what and why of it in some detail.

Self-esteem, and Who We Are and What We are!

Explanatory Models

The problem is at least one hundred years old and rotates around the axis of nature and nurture. WHO WE ARE we cannot change. We are stuck with it. It is our individual nature. It is what we were born with. It is our genetic code, the acorn that can produce the great oak tree in James Hillman’s language, “if we discover the code of our soul.”
It is our essence. Psychologists call WHO WE ARE “our real self.”

WHAT WE ARE is constantly changing all our lives. It is our nurtured self. It is a product of our culture, or programmed conditioning, our individual experience, and our personal growth and development, which is dependent on our maturity, discipline, focus, performance, stability, ability to handle surprise and adversity, in a word, our character.

WHAT WE ARE is fed by WHO WE ARE so there is much overlapping, and therefore confusion along the way. Psychologists call WHAT WE ARE “our acquired self,” or more prosaically, our personality.

It is not an easy road being a human being, and it has been difficult throughout history to have WHO WE ARE work in supportive consort and happy harmony with WHAT WE ARE.

Freud recognized the problem one hundred years ago and developed an explanatory model not about WHO WE ARE but WHAT WE ARE. His explanatory model included the ego, id and superego. He saw the mass drive to a technological society dwarfing and overwhelming man and producing recognizable hysteria in individuals unable to cope with this crushing reality.

Freud called the ego “the reality principle,” meaning that the individual viewed life in real terms based on experience. This would later be called “the adult” in transactional terms by Eric Berne in The Games People Play (1964). Thomas Harris would popularize this adult as “I’m OK – You’re OK” (1967), while John Dusay in Egograms – How I See You and You See Me (1977) would refine it into visual bar graphs for greater comprehension. The ego, then, relates to the adult, or the cognitive, or thinking man, and includes the rational aspect of man.

Freud referred to the id as “the pleasure principle,” meaning the individual would avoid pain at all cost and seek out pleasure without a thought to consequences. Berne referred to this in transactional terms as “the child,” Harris to the child as “I’m OK – You’re Not OK,” while Dusay broke “the child” down further to the “free child” and the “adapted child.” The id relates to the child, or conative, or behavior in impulsive man.

Freud referred to the superego as “the morality principle,” meaning the individual was programmed by society and convention on what he should think and do. Berne referred to this in transactional terms as “the parent,” while Harris sees the parent includes the mother and father and child at various stages of his four life positions of (1) “I’m not OK – You’re OK; (2) “I’m not OK – You’re Not OK”; (3) “I’m OK – You’re Not OK”; and (4) “I’m OK – You’re OK.”

If this sounds confusing, it isn’t. Harris goes to some trouble to explain that all these roles – adult, child, and parent – are part of the parent’s makeup. We never totally relinquish the role of the child, or do we maintain constancy at either the adult or parent level. Dusay, continuing his egograms, reveals the parent in terms of the “nurturing parent” and the “critical parent.” The superego, itself, relates to the parent, or affective, or feeling man, and includes the irrational aspect of man.

What these explanatory models attempt to do is to show how WHAT WE ARE never escapes any stage of our development from child to adult to parent. When we interact with each other, what they call transactions, the child, or the adult or the parent comes to the fore and acts out that role. So, the child is parent of the man or woman, and hopefully with a modicum of adult in the process.

So, WHAT WE ARE is a thinking, behaving and feeling being, and we bring all of this in some form to every interaction with others.

How WHO WE ARE and WHAT WE ARE play out – in a Macro Sense!

In simpler times WHO WE ARE and WHAT WE ARE were assumed to be the same, or at the very least interchangeable. Our father was a farmer, our mother was a homemaker, and we would work the family farm and marry a farm girl and she would be a homemaker like our mother. The same was true of the factory worker, the teacher, the doctor or lawyer. When I was in college that was starting to change, but still I ran into fourth and fifth generation farmers and third generation doctors. One friend in his last year of dentistry dreamed of being a farmer like his father, but his father decided one thing he wasn’t going to be was a farmer. There never was an unhappier dentist.

The battle of nature and nurture, of nurturing parent and critical parent is being played out right before our eyes every day.

Dr. Phil on television feels there is too much nurturing parent and so he leavens the mix of his tough love with a large dose of critical parent. On the other hand, Oprah Winfrey on television feels there is too much critical parent and leavens her mix of enabling love with a large dose of nurturing parent. Both are popular, and both appeal to WHAT WE ARE without a backward glance to WHO WE ARE.

They are involved in the self-esteem issue without mentioning it. These talking heads are parent surrogates for those of us who are looking for answers in all the wrong places. It doesn’t stop there.

Forty years ago, parents abandoned the role of parenting their baby boomer children with both mother and father becoming well-heeled breadwinners. This necessitated the leaving their children to mainly fend for themselves, and thus becoming essentially their own parents. A combination of guilt, neglect, and guile placed the emphasis on turning the home over to them, finding it easier to give into their every whim rather than deal with them. And it didn’t stop there either.

The parents were having so much fun working and playing and neglecting their traditional role as parents that they, too, didn’t want to grow up because they didn’t want to grow old. It became fashionable to be eternally young.

So, while children had the pleasures of adults without adult constraints, or the maturity to handle such freedom, adults tended to imitate the behavior of their children in dress, manner, and attitude with a total disregard for consequences.

The hippie movement and the establishment of communes was an alternative lifestyle driven by a desire of latch key youth for rediscovering the sense of family and community in an increasingly materialistic world.

By the same token, this breakdown of society brought into being all the explanatory models based on Freudianism mentioned above. Meanwhile, children who became their own parents didn’t fall into automatic step with the traditional role of education, which was to develop WHO WE ARE into WHAT WE ARE, or can become.

Instead, school at the grammar, high school and college level became the critical parent with the emphasis on class control with learning a secondary consideration in the curriculum. This produced a dumbing down of education that Ivan Illich calls Deschooling Society (1970), Thomas Sowell refers to as American Education: The Decline, The Deception, The Dogma (1993), and Jonathan Kozol simply calls Illiterate America (1985).

Education became a factory of discipline to compensate for the complete mismanagement in the home environment. Twenty years ago, one high school English teacher told me that her main objective every day was to survive the hostile climate of the classroom, where teachers were on trial, not the students. Now, in the electronic age, where college students get their assignments by email and attend amphitheater lectures, or simply view a computer monitor, there is little transaction in an interpersonal sense. So, these transactional analytical models no longer apply.

While education has been the critical parent, industry has become the nurturing parent. I have written elsewhere (Six Silent Killers: Management’s Greatest Challenge, 1998; Corporate Sin: Leaderless Leadership & Dissonant Workers, 2000) that corporations believed they could bribe poorly prepared workers into learning the appropriate skills and becoming productive workers with generous entitlement programs, recreational facilities, and meaningless performance appraisal reviews. Instead of creating a culture of contribution, they became the workers’ surrogate parent in a dependency relationship. If this weren’t bad enough, they launched programs they couldn’t guarantee such as lifetime employment, quality of work life, quality of management, and employee involvement.

Workers expected to be educated on the job, not seek education on their own time, even with the company paying for it. They expected the company to pay for their health insurance, all of it! Showing up for work on time was made more important than what was accomplished in a day’s work.

Management on its part expected to realize quality of work life, quality of management and total employee involvement without changing anything except cosmetically. The workplace, as a consequence, has gone from a culture of comfort, or management dependent, to a culture of complacency, or workers counterdependent on the corporation for their total well being. Workers don’t want to grow up, and management would prefer them as children rather than challenging adults to its authority. The result is that the workplace has become a war zone, with incipient catastrophe on the horizon.

How WHO WE ARE and WHAT WE ARE play out – in a Micro Sense!

From birth onward, we experience trials and tribulations, successes and failures, joys and disappointments, and all the while, we are told by others WHAT WE ARE as we experience these events. So, it is not surprising that that primal urge, that nascent sense, the “soul’s code,” or our true vocation based on WHO WE ARE gets little attention. Most parents today may be well meaning but still they are often unhelpful. I am such a parent.

I lost my daughter when she was seventeen. The pain in my heart was so deep that I’ve never experienced such a pain sense. It crippled me emotionally, ruined my marriage, and put me into a full-fledged retreat from life into books and ideas. I thought I knew WHO SHE WAS, but I could not truly fathom WHAT SHE WAS apart from what I expected her to be as a devoted daughter to me as loving father. I didn’t recognize the changes in her, only saw smooth surfaces with no bumps in the road. I guess I expected her to sublimate from a little girl into a grown women without any messy fluidity between the solid stage of childhood and blissful stage of adulthood. I wasn’t ready for her to become a woman.

WHO SHE WAS up to that time was a devoted daughter, loyal, sociable, undemanding, obedient, even docile, and then she discovered the Florida beaches, and boys discovered her. Guys that looked like movie stars and as old as I looked would bring her home in their fancy cars. She would walk our Afghan dog to the park, and guys would stop their cars, or honk. One guy didn’t stop and ran into a tree ogling her.

A lot of stuff happened that is not necessary to detail, but I can say it tore me apart because I no longer had control. Then she went off to college, but never graduated, ending up at the University of Chicago, where she was discovered by an international modeling agency. WHAT SHE WAS, a model who loved every aspect of the business, and still does, melted nicely with WHO SHE WAS, a six-two, blond, blue-eyed American beauty.

For ten years, I never saw her. She had the maturity to come back to her father. Her father didn’t have the maturity to seek her out. She is the mother of Rachel and Ryan whom I write about. She still models, is still beautiful, and she is now in her forties. We play tennis, grab a bite to eat occasionally when the kids are in school, and share our love of her children.

My story is not important. I share it with you to illustrate the difficult period teenager years are for both parents and teenagers. It is an impossible situation for the children to remain what parents believe them to be, when they are attempting to find out WHAT THEY ARE in terms of WHO THEY ARE.

It is sad to report but true. It is impossible for teenagers to be honest with parents because they are struggling to be honest with themselves. That is no small chore. Every time they try to be honest with themselves the stuff Eric Berne’s wrote about in The Games People Play throws them a curve. Children grow up with the tape recordings in their brains of the parent, the child, and the adult. That is why James Hillman in The Soul’s Code – In Search of Character and Calling (1996) insists that to grow up they must grow down.

The genetic code is WHO THEY ARE. Hillman likens it to an acorn that must grow down into fertile soil in order to rise up to become the mighty oak that it was meant to be. We as parents make this natural process unnatural by projecting our fears, being obsessed with control, and continuing the confusing roles of critical and nurturing parent. I mention them in this context as they are being revised in the newer generations of parents, as they see the shape of the home, school and workplace, not to mention the church, community and government in earlier twentieth century terms. There is a drive to get back to basics, but sometimes that, too, can backfire.

Take my daughter. She has a splendid nearly nine and eleven year old. The girl will be nine in May. She is assertive, antsy, and mature beyond her years, alert, manipulative, and has her own agenda. She is in many ways a little adult and loves to go shopping, to teas, and to social functions with her mother. There is too much “free child” in her in Dusay’s model and not enough “adapted child.” She is used to always getting her own way, and expects it at school, with her friends, and with every one she meets. She is popular but in many ways a spoiled brat. The indicators are not good for mother-daughter accord in a few years.

The boy will be eleven in April. He is quiet, non-confrontational, introspective, unassuming, and emotionally immature to the point of being fragile. Yet, he is physically quite imposing – fiver-eight, broad shouldered, 170 pounds and already wears a size twelve in men’s shoes. Like his sister, he is blond and blue-eyed, but there the resemblance ends. He is big without being fat, and has a physique like his father, but he allows others to hit and taunt him, doesn’t stick up for himself, and allows his mother to fight his battles and make excuses for his timidity. He recently was accepted to an academically challenging prep school, the first in his elementary public school’s history. His teachers have made much of it, while he is embarrassed with all the attention, preferring the taunts to this. The indicators are that he will run into trouble in this new prep school environment. Chances are his mother will do everything in her power to force him to fit when his constitution quietly rejects the attempt. If she wins, it will be at the expense of WHO HE IS.

My daughter is determined to play the mother of WHO and WHAT her children ARE, refusing to remember what a disaster her father created for her many years ago.

How WHO WE ARE and WHAT WE ARE play out in a Compare & Compete World

When personality (what we are) becomes more dominant than our essence (who we are), we are likely to chase ambition. Ambition, which is seldom criticized in our culture, is a desire to get ahead often at the expense of others in a compare and compete world.

With such thinking, we cultivate a desire to distance ourselves from others, and to win admission into a more elite or prestigious group. It is the spur of wealth, the idea of capitalism, and the dominant code of our society. The downside is that it creates an artificial and even synthetic culture.

Since most of us are unlikely to become “rich & famous,” we can imitate the “rich & famous” by buying the cars they promote, purchasing homes that resemble theirs, and living imitative lifestyles that approximate what we read they live. It is more than likely that our social clubs and events are caricatures of theirs.

Comparing and competing is not new. The Romans appropriated Greek sophistication to buoy up their culture of engineers and soldiers. They had no Socrates, Plato or Aristotle, but they could build things and conquer peoples. Krishnamurti wrote of comparing:

We are taught to compare ourselves with another, yet when I compare myself with another I am destroying myself. In a school, in an ordinary school where there are lots of boys, when one boy is compared with another, who is very clever, who is the head of the class, what is actually taking place? You are destroying the boy. That’s what we are doing throughout life. Now, can I live without comparison, without comparison with anybody? This means there is no high, no low, there is not the one who is superior and the other who is inferior. You are actually what you are and to understand what you are, this process of comparison must come to an end. I only compare in order to gain, in order to achieve, in order to become, but when I don’t compare I am beginning to understand what I am. Beginning to understand what I am is far more fascinating, far more interesting, it goes beyond all this stupid comparison (Talks and Dialogues – J. Krishnamurti, Avon Books, 1968, p. 88).

Fewer still would question the merits of competing. We take pride in being a competitive society. Comparing, competing destroys the individual and WHO HE IS, for it puts the focus on others at the expense of gaining a grasp of the individual’s own essence. Psychiatrists Willard and Marguerite Beecher weigh in on this subject:

Competition enslaves and degrades the mind. It is one of the most prevalent and certainly the most destructive of all the many forms of psychological dependence. Eventually, if not overcome, it produces a dull, imitative, insensitive, mediocre, burned-out, stereotyped individual who is devoid of initiative, imagination, originality, and spontaneity. He is humanly dead. Competition produces zombies! Nonentities! (Beyond Success and Failure: Ways to self-reliance and maturity, Pocket Books, 1966, p. 56).

WHO WE ARE is likely to encounter many pitfalls and pot holes along the road even though it is all we are. If we pay attention, don’t allow ourselves to be sidetracked by comparing and competing, we can realize our potential and satisfy our destiny, but it is not an easy journey.

The combination of WHO WE ARE with WHAT WE ARE in harmony can produce a happy, healthy and satisfied person. When WHO WE ARE dominates WHAT WE ARE we are likely to become odd balls, nerdy, out-of-sync with the world around us, and in a social sense a pariah.

Aside from ambition, when WHAT WE ARE dominates WHO WE ARE, we are more likely to be attracted to celebrity worshiping and to become true believers, leading vicarious lives through second hand identities. Such a life is mainly that of spectator rather than participant. We live through the achievements of others as hysterical fans or doting admirers. We are unlikely to read newspapers, and if we do, we read only the front-page headlines and the entertainment or sports pages. We watch tons of television, and never read a book. We want summaries of information, not details, which television provides in network new in three-minute dosages between five-minute commercials, and that is our current event fix for the day. We work a job on automatic pilot and maintain the same routine week-to-week, and see the same people, entertain ourselves in the same way without variation.

When WHO WE ARE becomes more dominant than WHAT WE ARE, we can develop an attitude. We don’t need to learn new things because we are already smart enough. We don’t need to meet new people because most people are drips anyway. We don’t share information outside our specialty with others because they’re too thick to appreciate it. We know a hundred and one things are wrong with the world but we still drive an SUV tank, dump our spent batteries in the garbage, think nothing of throwing our trash in a vacant lot, and see no point in voting when elections are rigged anyway.

To restore balance, we must get beyond comparing and competing, beyond living mainly second hand lives as spectators, beyond waiting for someone else to take the lead, beyond having a score of criticisms for doers but not the gumption to join them in the doing. We are contaminated with conflict, obedience, acceptance, fear, security, jealousy, anxiety, and therefore it leaves little quality time for us to focus on WHO WE ARE in order to pursue meaningful experience that would see that WHAT WE ARE is consistent with it.

Krishnamurti says, The more you know about yourself the greater the quality of maturity, the immature person is he who does not know himself at all. One of the main features of fear is the non-acceptance of what one is, the inability to face oneself.

When children reach a certain age, they attempt to find out WHAT THEY ARE opposed to WHO THEY ARE. This is a stage of rebellion, as they want to separate themselves from their parents, not imitate and emulate them. They want to discover their own identity, which most likely will not differ too much from their parents once they settle on it, that is, if the parents allow them the room.

The irony of my life is that I never rebelled until I was married. I was a young executive in South Africa during the height of apartheid. I also saw my Roman Catholic Church in a different context as it acquiesced in the midst of this contemptible policy. Suddenly, my life made no sense to me anymore. I resigned a promising career and I was not yet thirty-five with a wife and four small children to support. For the next three years, I read books, wrote one, and when nearly broke, when back to school full-time to pursue a Ph.D., consulting on the side.

Some would say I have been rebelling ever since. It has been a tortuous road to marrying WHO I AM with WHAT I AM, and what I am today is a writer of such little missives as this one in the hopes that they help you in marrying your two sides of your divided self into one whole.

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About the author: Dr. Fisher is an OD psychologist who has just completed his ninth and tenth books. They are Who Put You In The Cage?; and Near Journey’s End: Can the Planet Earth Survive Self-indulgent Man? Both are due to be published in 2005. All his books are available on the Internet.