Self-esteem And Personality

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Probably all practicing psychologists notice that a significant part of the people who turn to them for advice have serious problems with self-esteem: either low or unstable and hesitant

Interestingly, compared to the Soviet period (who remembers) in recent years, there have been significantly fewer people with high self-esteem, as well as those who have developed an "inferiority complex based on megalomania."

In the current social situation, the requirements for achieving success and realizing one's ambitions are very high, so many people have appeared with deceived expectations from themselves.

Self-esteem - this is only one of the parameters by which a person's personality can be assessed.

But it is worth noting that self-esteem is only one of the parameters by which one can assess a person's personality and identify his personality traits, and, accordingly, personal problems. In some psychological concepts, for example, among the followers of Vygotsky, the concept of "personality" is key: both for theorists and for practicing psychologists working in this approach, including psychotherapists.

Psychologists (both theorists and practitioners) see in a person only what allows them to highlight the theory of the psyche in their hands. They look at a person through certain “conceptual glasses” and, accordingly, notice only what can be felt in the inner world of their wards, using these very means.

Vygotsky's followers perceived the personality as a whole, as a system, and therefore tried to understand how developed a person's “personality structures” are, what violations or gaps exist, and what needs to be done to eliminate or compensate for these violations.

A very important theoretical and practical principle in this approach was the concept of development. About the development of the psyche and personality structures, which are formed at certain periods of a person's life, and then develop.

A psychotherapist working in this approach, first of all, tries to determine what in a person's personality has been violated, not formed or turned out to be underdeveloped. Further work began on the harmonization and development of the individual.

“Personality” is a more capacious and functional concept than “self-esteem”. Figuratively speaking, psychologists, who concentrate their attention only on a person's self-esteem, begin to work with him, focusing on the readings of only one device on that dashboard, which was called “personality”.

Naturally, the question arises: is such a reduction of meanings justified?

Are psychologists doing the right thing who concentrate their efforts on work primarily with a person's self-esteem?

Or it can be assumed that in practice only some simple schemes work, and everything complex is from the evil one, so why turn to such a “muddy” and too complex concept like “personality” if there is an opportunity to quickly help a person by correcting his attitude to to myself.

However, self-esteem is only part of the whole. And the one who begins to work with self-esteem, involuntarily strives for the completion of the gestalt and naturally comes to the problem of solving a person's personal problems. Otherwise, the psychologist simply does not reflect and does not notice what effect his work with a person has on changes in his personal sphere.

What can be seen in the human psyche using the concept of "self-esteem"

There is some logical deception in the concept of “self-esteem”: in fact, the image of oneself that a person has formed during his life was not created by himself, but imposed on him from the outside. The real reasons why a person evaluates himself in this way, and not in another way, are very rarely realized, but even less often people reflect on the reasons why they have formed exactly that and not another picture of the world. But the way a person perceives the world around him and what place in this world is assigned to him greatly affects his self-esteem.

Self-assessment turned out to be a very convenient tool and very easily fell into the hands of psychologists of the most diverse orientations: from psychoanalysts to those involved in behavior correction or harmonization of cognitive structures; from adepts of gestalt therapy - to supporters of NLP or various derivatives of this practice.

From the point of view of psychoanalysis, low self-esteem, as well as dislike and rejection of oneself, indicate that in some “sensitive periods” of childhood, a person was faced with cold and rejection of parents and loved ones or with aggression and evil criticism, as well as with various forms " parental curses "and" spells ".

Proponents of Gestalt therapy, looking at a person through the prism of self-esteem, can see that this person, in the process of not very legible introjection, has swallowed too many assessments, attitudes, judgments and reactions of other people into his inner world without a proper critical attitude towards them. These phantoms from the past immersed in the human psyche do not allow him to adequately perceive himself in the present, and besides, they eat up his energy and forces, since they are beyond the control of a person and he cannot fully deal with them.

In this case, self-esteem may not just be underestimated, but rather inadequate and jumping. So, for example, a person cannot end a conflict with his parents or react to his grievances in any way. Deceived expectations can neither be realized, nor be completely rejected, the assessments and sentences heard cannot in any way be canceled and challenged.

So, for example, a person cannot in any way get rid of the attitude that his parents demonstrated towards him at a time when he was forced to take everything on trust and did not have the opportunity to challenge their sentences. The image of these parents settled in the psyche of a person, in his inner world, and a person cannot manage to expel him outside in order to finally find out his relationship with him.

Very often, the love relationship of people ends in a breakup, because a person can, on the one hand, catch the traits of his parent in the stalls (boys fall in love with girls who are similar to their mothers, and girls with men who resemble their fathers). On the other hand, he projects onto his beloved the image of a parent that is stuck in his memory and in his inner world.

A person unconsciously tries to end the internal conflict with the image of his parent, imposing his role on his beloved or beloved. His partner, of course, begins to resent and try to break out of this role. So the gestalt remains unfinished, the inner conflict remains unresolved, and the relationship turns out to be completely ruined.

How does a person appear if you look at him through "glasses" collected from various modifications of the concept of "personality".

A personality is an instance that collects into a single whole the various spheres of his life: emotional, intellectual, volitional, and also organizes his behavioral strategies for embedding into society and culture.

We can say that a person is the person that we show on behalf of ourselves to other people and society as a whole. On the other hand, it is a means of mobilizing all our internal resources.

When we say about someone: "he is a colorful person" or "he is an interesting person", we first of all react to the personality of this person. On the way he interacts with other people, on the image of himself that he presents to others. Personality is the ambassador of our inner “I” in social reality.

When we say that a person has low self-esteem, it means that his personality does not cope well with the duties of a “representative in social reality”. On the other hand, we can make the assumption that this low self-esteem makes it very difficult for a person to mobilize their inner resources. The riches of his psyche are underestimated, and he is shy or afraid to present them to the world.

Vygotsky's concept contains ideas about "higher mental functions." In fact, these are the abilities of a person's personality, thanks to which it integrates and mobilizes the capabilities and resources of more primitive and natural psychological reactions. Roughly speaking, thanks to higher mental functions, a person manages to keep his violent psyche, with its emotions, impulses and passions, in subjection.

The psyche and physicality of a person are sources of strength and energy, this energy can be mobilized and directed towards the implementation of some plans and desires in the social sphere. And the logic of the mobilization of this energy, as well as its distribution, is controlled by the above-mentioned higher mental functions.

In this sense, self-esteem is only one of the "instruments" in the organization of such a higher mental function as "reflection". Through reflection, a person receives feedback on his social and professional activity: he understands who he is, what abilities, means and resources he has, what opportunities and chances he has in this world.

On the other hand, reflection enables a person to understand what is happening in those social situations in which he is involved in life. For example, social reflection is the ability to understand the written and unwritten rules of the game in a team, as well as understand those hidden intrigues and games that are not published, but have a strong influence on what is happening in a given social group. Reflection of interpersonal relationships is the ability to understand what is going on in the soul and in the head of the person with whom you are in a relationship, and also to understand what influence your words, actions and deeds have on him.

It is important to note that a person's ability to reflect is formed gradually throughout his life. And he does not always provide an analysis of what is happening at a conscious level. Sometimes children are taught how to track the consequences of their words and actions, sometimes they learn from their own bitter or successful experiences. And sometimes parents simply instill in their children the presence or absence of certain qualities and abilities.

And if we go back to self-esteem, then we can say that when we see a person's low self-esteem, then this is a sure signal that we should pay attention to different levels of his reflection. We must understand where, when and for what reasons, he began to experience failures in assessing himself and his resources. On the other hand, we must understand that low self-esteem is only a symptom, an indication that the entire system of a person's personality is malfunctioning.

The concept of "personality" in ethnography and ethnopsychology

Such a tool for self-organization of a person, as a person, did not arise in history by chance, and its development took place gradually, and the degree of its significance and role in the social interaction of people changed.

The Russian word personality comes from the word "face", which brings its understanding closer to the Latin "persona", that is, it is a mask that they put on, wishing to present to the public this or that social character. In archaic societies, these masks were used in order to show what place the person wearing it occupies in the social structure of the tribe. She pointed to both family and social ties, so that it was clear who and what was hiding under this mask.

In modern culture, personality turned out to be very closely related to the concept of "individuality", which gave a slightly different shade to what exactly manifests itself in a person's personality in his relationship with society.

Some psychologists, for example, the famous American psychologist Virginia Satir, assign a very important role in understanding a person's personality to the analysis of his family ties. When working with a person, she restores the structure of family ties as deeply into the ancestral history as his memory allows. In the course of her sessions, she builds a kind of "system of totem connections", which the archaic peoples fought during their tribal holidays.

In part, the tribal holidays were intended precisely to reproduce the history of the creation of the world together with the history of the tribe. Each person in this action occupied a certain place, put on a certain mask, indicating his connection with ancestors and contemporaries. Virginia Satir reproduced this structure of the genus and determined what forces and connections formed the personality of her patient.

In this sense, self-esteem is a derivative of the place the child occupied in the family system. And this family assessment of a person can be changed only by replacing it with a personal perception of oneself (individual self-assessment). That is, real self-esteem appears only when it is possible to correct the external.

If we continue the line of Virginia Satir, then it becomes necessary to restore not only the “sculpture of the family”, but also the structure of that social environment, in which a person's personality was formed in different “sensitive periods” of development. What masks and what roles was imposed on him by his environment, what of this and for what reason he interorized (took in and attributed to himself).