A certain breed of rabble-rousing newspaper columnist has, for many years now, railed angrily against the "fact" that British children spend such a large proportion of their time in the classroom being taught self-esteem. This is one of those special kinds of facts that isn't technically true, but that hasn't stopped it spreading far and wide. (Although who really knows what's true these days, what with the moral relativism our children are being taught when they're not being taught self-esteem?) Which makes it slightly tricky to broach the possibility that these critics might be right - albeit for the wrong reasons - to be sceptical about the merits of self-esteem. What if feeling good about yourself isn't actually all that healthy?
The brilliant psychotherapist Albert Ellis, who died last month at the age of 93, had almost nothing in common with these clench-fisted, spittle-spraying commentators. Apart from anything else, they wouldn't have approved of his famously foul-mouthed approach to psychology: all human beings, he liked to point out at buttoned-up academic conferences, are "out of their fucking minds". Yet Ellis called self-esteem "the greatest emotional disturbance known to man". Among the tens of thousands of pop-psychology titles on the topic - Ten Days To Self-Esteem, Self-Esteem: Your Fundamental Power, Empowering Teens To Build Self-Esteem - Ellis's The Myth Of Self-Esteem sounds a nearly unique note of doubt.
At first glance, thinking well of yourself seems obviously preferable to thinking poorly of yourself. But the problem with developing high self-esteem, Ellis argued, was that in getting rid of one set of damaging thoughts, you end up reinforcing something even more deep-seated and damaging: the very idea of self-rating. You can shift your self-rating from low to high on the scale, but you're still using a scale. Maybe you're tying your sense of self to your achievements at work, your success in relationships or the size of your bank balance. But in all cases you're tying it to something, thereby setting yourself up for a traumatising slide back down the self-esteem scale the next time something goes wrong. Self-esteem, Ellis argued, is "a self-defeating concept that encourages [people] to make conditional evaluations of self". In its place, he advocated unconditional self-acceptance. Rate your "performances, deeds and acts", if you wish, he counselled, but not your whole self.
It only adds weight to this view to discover that there's almost no evidence that high self-esteem makes us better people, or that low self-esteem makes us worse. Numerous studies have demonstrated little or no correlation between low self-esteem and a propensity to indulge in violence, drug use or racist behaviour, for example, or between low self-esteem and teenage pregnancy. Meanwhile, one study suggests a positive correlation between high self-esteem and drink-driving. To summarise Ellis: don't feel bad about yourself. But give some thought to the idea of not feeling good about yourself, either.
oliver.burkeman@theguardian.com
