Self, Democracy, Self-Esteem

If you have ever wondered where self-esteem actually comes from, and found that nobody could tell you, I would like to teach you. What follows is why, and then you can decide.

In more than thirty years of practice, sitting with hundreds of people in consulting rooms and group rooms and classrooms, I have almost never met a person who arrived already knowing how a self gets built. Accomplished people. Kind people. People who have read a great deal. Nobody teaches it.1

There is another reason, and it is more personal. This fall, at sixty-seven, I begin formal psychoanalytic training. After three decades of practice I am going back to be a student of it, which some of my colleagues find funny. A self is not a thing you finish, and I would rather demonstrate that than assert it.

And there is the reason my practice is named for. For most of a century, the deepest account we have of how a person is put together has been kept behind a professional gate, available to those who could afford the couch and the credential. That arrangement is not politically neutral. Our politics now runs on contempt, and a citizenry with no working model of its own inner life is easier to enrage than to persuade. Handing the machinery back, so that a person can catch their own reactivity in the act and see what weakness in the self it is defending, is the only way I know to improve our politics from the inside out. Psychology for the people, meant literally.

Six sessions, online, kept small.

If that sounds like a class you would take, tell me. Joining the list costs nothing and commits you to nothing. It only tells me whether to build the thing.

What follows is the argument, so you can decide whether you want six sessions of it.

Grandiosity Is Not Self-Esteem

Most people arrive at this subject with one of two broken models and no idea there might be a third. Either they have absorbed the in-the-place-of-therapy version, in which self-esteem is a stack of conceivably more accurate thoughts you talk yourself into, or they treat the whole subject with cynicism, afraid that to care about the self at all is to be sentimental, soft, or worse, narcissistic. Most of them, in the end, confuse self-esteem with something closer to its opposite.

You can watch that confusion play out at the national level. When 47 calls America a “hot” country, the way a promoter talks about a club with a line outside, that is not a person brimming with self-esteem. That is grandiosity, and grandiosity is not an excess of self. It is the patriotic flag a depleted self plants over the swiss cheese holes where the structure was supposed to be. Melville had a name for the type. The distinction matters, because if you mistake the loud, contemptuous, perpetually aggrieved performance of bigness for confidence, you will keep prescribing the wrong medicine, to the country and to the people at your own kitchen table. And those people are worth a second look. The ones who make you feel bad are almost always the ones who feel worse.

Part of the trouble is a word. Self-esteem is oddly related to ego strength. Outside the psychoanalytic world, ego is confused with narcissistic grandiosity, so that to have a strong ego is already an accusation. Inside, the ego is an agency we want to see strengthened, because ego strength means the capacity to regulate emotion, to soothe oneself, to feel empathy for others, and to plan ahead rather than live at the mercy of the moment. What the culture treats as a vice turns out to be the very thing whose absence we are suffering from. Freud's famous dictum, from the New Introductory Lectures of 1933, is usually rendered: where id was, there ego shall be.

Most of us are more familiar with the experience of low self-esteem than with any of this, and there are ways to take its measure. One is the ability to speak up on behalf of the self inside a relationship. Family systems theory offers a version of this in the I-statement, which asks a person to say how they feel, to take responsibility for that feeling rather than assign blame, to separate thoughts (“if you loved me, you would have known that would ruin my day”) from feelings (“I often feel hurt and confused when you forget important holidays, and unsure how to bring it up when we are both so stressed”), and still to name the inequity at stake, whether it concerns values, race, sexual life, raising children, or the plain question of who is allowed to enjoy their life. The capacity to do that is a fair index of how much self there is to speak from.

But it is clear enough that many people do not know how to make such statements, or that a feeling can be metabolized somewhat before it is handed to another person. Often people use one another as extensions of the self, living in a kind of suspended animation in which the boundary between You and Me stays blurred. This is common, and not in itself a catastrophe. The trouble comes when someone begins to wake from the merger and finds they must do something sudden or shocking, a tantrum or a breakup, in order to feel the outline of a sovereign self. Self-esteem is handicapped by any arrangement in which it never becomes ordinary to say aloud what is working and what is not.

The real sickness, I think, is that we are not taught as a culture to feel emotion in the body before we stuff it or dump it. Nor are we taught the next thing, that emotion can be metabolized inside a growing self, often with a therapist's help, into feeling, which always includes an awareness of oneself and the other person at the same time. Emotion discharged is a weapon. Feeling held is a form of contact.

I see that educational failure erupt most reliably around political difference, and it erupts in therapy too. One member of a family is desperate for everyone to read a certain op-ed. Another reads the same column as antisemitic and says so. Within minutes the fight is no longer about the argument, it is about each other's character, and the accusations start stacking, sadistic, retaliatory, aimed at the person rather than the claim. What strikes me, every time, is that with a little more self, whatever that turns out to be, each of them could have put an idea on the table without needing to annihilate the person across from it. So building self, in the consulting room and at that table, has become my way of participating in the political crisis of our moment, rather than my way of hiding from it.

To see why healing the self is not a retreat into self-care or political isolation, it helps to know where the idea of a self even comes from inside psychoanalysis, a tradition most people write off before they understand it. The field has changed its mind at least three times about what it is even studying, and each change was a demotion of something we were sure was central.2

My clients, some of whom have sat with me more than once a week, tend to think of Freud as a coach or a bigot, sexist and homophobic, an old man obsessed with sex and cocaine. The real picture is different and more interesting. Freud produced one of the great Copernican demotions of the modern mind. In his 1917 essay on the difficulties of psychoanalysis he lined himself up behind Copernicus and Darwin: the first told us the earth is not the center, the second that we are not a separate creation, and the third that the ego is not even master in its own house. Underneath our reasons are wishes, hurts, and rages we never worked through, many of them laid down in early childhood, running the show while we congratulate ourselves on our judgment. The unconscious is an “other,” our most intimate partner from whom we are the most estranged.

That whole picture, according to Freud, is based on a ground-breaking concept of “libido,” sexual energy that approximates how Plato saw the god Eros. For Freud the basic way in which this libido was set into motion was through the “drive,” libidinal and aggressive, pressure seeking discharge, held in check by defense and by civilization. The self, in that model, is barely a character. It is a byproduct of the ego brokering deals between instinct and reality.

The first great move away from that came with the object relations school, Klein, Fairbairn, Winnicott.3 Their wager was that the fundamental unit is not the drive but the relationship. Fairbairn put it most sharply in 1952: libido is not pleasure-seeking, it is object-seeking. We are built to reach for the other before we are built to discharge a tension. Melanie Klein populated the inner world with objects, split into idealized and persecutory, loved and hated, managed through projection and introjection, a whole interior theater of violence and reparation. Winnicott brought in the environment, the holding, the good-enough mother, the true self that can only come forward when the surround does not demand premature compliance and force a false self into its place. The drama had moved from tension and release to love and hate toward the people we take inside us.

The second move, and the one I have made my clinical home, is Heinz Kohut and the self psychology he built in the 1970s. Kohut changed the basic unit again. Not the drive, not even the internal object, but the self, and with it the selfobject: the other experienced not as a separate person I love or resent, but as a part of me, performing a function I cannot yet perform alone. He named three of these needs. We need mirroring, to be met with the gleam in someone's eye that says our aliveness is a delight and not a problem. We need someone to idealize, to borrow calm and strength from a figure we can look up to. And we need twinship, the plain relief of being among our own kind.

When those needs go chronically unmet in early life, the result is not simply repression, as it would be for Freud. It is deficit. The self does not cohere. There are holes in it, emptinesses, and we spend our lives recruiting other people to plug them.

What I love about self psychology, and what is sending me back to school for it, is that the self can be thought of as a real place inside, all too often compromised by failures in early life. Nobody outgrows selfobjects entirely, and the aim is not to stop needing others. The aim is that the need becomes conscious and reciprocal, so that the other person is met as a person and not consumed as a function.

Which brings the theory back to the country. Consider what it means to use others as selfobjects at scale, and the president of our beleaguered country becomes legible in a way that no amount of fact-checking makes him. He requires an unbroken supply of mirroring, and any room that fails to provide it becomes an enemy. But the harder question is not about him. It is why so many people will forgive the corruption, the deference to Russia, the demand at NATO that Greenland be handed over. Part of the answer, I suspect, is that he serves as their selfobject too, an object of idealization for a self that never got to idealize a parent who could receive the idealization without exploiting it. A child who idealizes a parent, and is not used by that parent in return, comes away with something durable and portable. A child who is used comes away hungry, and stays hungry, and will find someone to be hungry for.

Kohut did one more thing that matters politically. He refused to treat narcissism as an embarrassment to be outgrown on the way to mature object love. He made it a developmental line in its own right, one that ripens, when it is allowed to, into empathy, creativity, humor, and wisdom. The man who has to keep announcing that the country is hot is not too full of self. He is empty of it, and looting every room he enters for the mirroring he never got. The relative who cannot float an op-ed without contempt is doing a smaller version of the same thing. Contempt is what a hole in the self sounds like when it is asked to hold a disagreement.

The reason self psychology can actually build something, where insight alone often cannot, is that it works experience-near rather than experience-distant. Kohut called the instrument of the work empathy, which he defined precisely, not as sympathy but as vicarious introspection. The cure does not come from a clever interpretation handed down from across the room. It comes from what happens in the room when I inevitably fail the patient in some small way, and then repair it, in vivo, so that a little more structure gets laid down each time.

I watched this recently with a man I have seen in both individual and couples work. When his partner failed to mirror him, he would collapse, and from inside the collapse he would think the worst of himself and then the worst of his partner. As enough trust built up among the three of us, he could finally see that the collapse was not the truth about him. It was the best way of coping with hurt that a much younger version of him had been able to internalize, and it had simply kept running. Only then could we have a real conversation.

When I asked whether he had any system for cataloguing his gains at the end of a day and taking stock of them, he laughed out loud. Who would do such a thing, when there is always the next thing.

So, practicing my own vicarious introspection while he sat there considering, I asked myself whether I had taken stock that day, and I had to admit I had not. Silently, I made the list:

1. I woke up early and saw the sun come up.
2. I took my GLP-1 and survived the side effects.
3. I threw three tarot cards.
4. I paid a bill I had been avoiding.

The trouble with a list like that, if you have not done any work on the self, is that a voice takes it apart before you finish writing it. New-age garbage, it says. Self-involved. Beneath you. Everyone knows this voice. What almost nobody notices is that it arrives before the evidence does, which is the tell that it is not judgment at all but an old defense, installed early, doing what it was built to do.

A prompt for you

So here is the intervention, and it is smaller than you want it to be. Before you make your list, stand up. Drink some water. Get your feet under you and breathe. Then take the list one item at a time and let each one land before you move to the next. Do not argue with the voice, because arguing grants it standing. Simply notice that it showed up, notice how quickly, and go on with the list anyway.

The point is not the list. The point is that you have just done for yourself, in a small way, what was not done enough for you: you looked at your own aliveness and did not flinch. That is mirroring. Nobody is too old to receive it, and after a certain age you may have to be the one who provides it. Do that daily for a year and something is different, not because you thought better thoughts, but because a structure got built.

Self-esteem mastery takes time, like learning any language

None of this is self-care in the boutique sense. A self that can take stock of itself is a self that can sit in a disagreement without needing to destroy the other person in order to survive it. That is not a small thing in a country whose politics increasingly runs on contempt. Building the self is slow, unglamorous, and, as far as I can tell, one of the few genuinely political acts left to us.

About the class

That is the argument, and it is roughly the shape of the six sessions: what self-esteem is not, then Freud and the demotion of the ego, then the relational turn, then Kohut and the three needs, then how a self gets built after childhood through rupture and repair, and finally the practice and the politics and the wager that they are the same subject.

It would be for anyone who has noticed what contempt is doing to their family, their country, and the voice in their own head, and who suspects the three are related. No background in psychoanalysis is needed. No intention of becoming an analyst is needed. What is needed is a certain willingness to look at the machinery.

A word about who I have in mind. Of the three needs, twinship is the one I have spent my working life watching people be quietly denied. Queer people who learned early that their aliveness was a problem to be managed. People whose parents' language, or skin, or country of origin made them foreign in the room. Anyone who has been the only one, anywhere, for long enough to forget what it is like not to be. When mirroring is withheld from a whole category of person, the resulting deficit is not a private failing. It is a political fact, and it goes on to shape how such a person votes, argues, loves, and forgives.

So this class is LGBTQ-affirmative because I am, and because the theory was waiting for us. It is multicultural because the self does not develop in a vacuum, and any account of self-esteem that ignores what the world tells a person about their worth is not a serious account. And it is political because a citizen who can lose an argument and stay in the room is the raw material a democracy is made of, and such citizens are made, not found.

If you want it, say so, and I will build it.

A last thing. Freud's circle ran free clinics in Vienna and Berlin, on the stated principle that the poor have as much right to a mind as the rich. That principle is why this work is free and will stay free.