What Does "Self Esteem" Mean?

When the Supreme Court of the United States attempted to create obscenity standards in Jacobellis v. Ohio, Justice Potter Stewart opined that obscenity was hard to define, but that "I know it when I see it." Many people are forced to use that same kind of reasoning when discussing the concept of self esteem. They understand it on a general level, feel they can recognize it when it's displayed, but have a very difficult time defining the concept. Others have taken a stab at delineating what self esteem really is. Let's look at what the term "self esteem" means.

A noted psychotherapist, Dr. Nathaniel Branden, argued that self esteem was, "The disposition to experience oneself as being competent to cope with the basic challenges of life and of being worthy of happiness." That definition doesn't do a lot in terms of creating bright line distinctions between self esteem and other character traits and doesn't provide a great deal of information about how why might "see" self esteem, but it does lay out a strong basic idea of the concept. In Branden's view, self esteem is an outlook toward life in which one feels they can handle life's challenges and that they can be happy.

Branden's definition was later adjusted by the National Association for Self Esteem. The advocacy organization maintains that self esteem is "The experience of being capable of meeting life's challenges and being worthy of happiness." That seemingly subtle alteration is actually quite significant. Whereas Branden maintained self esteem involved how a person might feel about his or her abilities and worthiness, the NASE position asserts that self esteem is present only when one is actually able to handle challenges and experience love. It makes self esteem less a matter of individual outlook and directs attention to the reality of one's abilities.

The NASE definition is now widely accepted within the self esteem research community. Dr. Christopher Mruk, the author of Self Esteem: Research, Theory and Practice, maintains that the NASE definition is among the most accurate approaches to the concept.

Understanding the concept of self esteem on a definitional level, however, doesn't tell us a great deal about how people manifest the trait. That's an unavoidable difficulty due to the variations in personalities and the fact that different people can use similar behaviors to exhibit different feelings.

Those limitations force the NASE definition into a psychological version of Potter Stewart's conception or pornography. The definition tells us what self esteem is, but we still don't know how to spot it.

Can self esteem be measured? Many people believe so. There are a series of tests and tools used in the research community to assess the presence of self esteem. These usually involve having subjects answer a number of questions and/or allowing them to respond to series of hypothetical scenarios. The data is then converted into a score reflective of the individual test-takers level of self esteem.

These tools can be a valuable diagnostic, but are often decried by critics. Many argue that the tests operationalize a concept of self esteem in their results, but that the particular operationalization may or may not be an accurate reflection of the concept. Others maintain that the tests are merely artificial constructs that attempt to distill the human condition into an easy-to-work-with score, but that don't provide a great deal of real information about anyone's sense of self worth.

Whether you embrace the definitions of Branden and NASE or reject them as imprecise, there certainly do seem to be variations in how people perceive themselves and their role in the world. You can believe that various diagnostic tools measure those differences and create an idea of self esteem, or you can feel as though they provide relatively little clinically significant data. You may feel as though you can pinpoint what constitutes self esteem, or you may decide that "you know it when you see it."

Regardless of your perspective, it seems almost impossible to deny that one's feelings about himself or herself in terms of being able to handle the challenges doled out by life and his or her worthiness of receiving positive attention do vary and that they would necessarily have a powerful role in one's life. We might not be able to say, "This is what self esteem means" with precision, but we can see that it is an important concept.

Potter Stewart later adjusted his position on obscenity, but he probably could "know it when he saw it." So it is with many of us and the concept of self esteem.