Self-Esteem Research, Theory, and Practice Toward a Positive ...

Major Self-Esteem Theories and Programs 109A chief feature of this definition of self-esteem is that it is dynamic.By using such words as “pitted” (pitting), “carry” (carrying), and“back” (backing) James shows that self-esteem is a vital part of humanbehavior. By making it contingent on success and failure, self-esteemalso takes on many characteristics of a basic need. For example, whenwe are deprived of self-esteem we seek it out and when we have it wemust work to keep it. Such a motivational view of self-esteem can alsobe seen in the psychodynamic approach to it. For example, Adler (1927)understood self-esteem in terms of a drive toward “superiority” thatmotivated people to reach higher levels of social status and we saw thatWhite (1963) tied self-esteem to mastery through the effectance motiveand competence.The good news of this model is twofold. First, self-esteem motivatesus to try to master the challenges of life. As such, it is a crucial developmentaland motivational force. Second, if self-esteem is like a ratio that isdependent on our successes or failures, then change is inherently possible.In fact, James even pointed out that there are several ways to alter theratio in a direction that is favorable for self-esteem: We may increase selfesteemby finding ways to have more successes in areas that matter to usor we may change the areas that matter to us in ways that lighten theburden of self-esteem. The bad news, of course, is that by making selfesteemdependent on success, it also becomes contingent. For somepeople, the pursuit of self-esteem in this way is more costly than beneficialas Crocker and Park (2003, 2004) and Crocker and Nuer (2003,2004) pointed out.The Social Learning TraditionMorris RosenbergIn Chapter 2 we saw that another early approach to self-esteem involvedemphasizing its interpersonal character through the Cooley–Mead tradition.This approach was further developed by Harry Stack Sullivan (1953)when he applied it to practical problems in his interpersonal approach topsychiatry. The tradition matured in terms of its empirical work in themid-1960s when Morris Rosenberg began his monumental investigationswith more than 5000 subjects. After defining self-esteem as “a positive ornegative attitude toward a particular object, namely, the self” (1965,p. 30), he focused his attention on “the bearing of certain social factorson self-esteem and to indicate the influence of self-esteem on socially significantattitudes and behavior” (p. 15).Rosenberg began by pointing out that understanding self-image orself-esteem as attitudinal phenomena created by social and cultural forces