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

The Crucial Issue of Defining Self-Esteem 27the immediate possibility of comfort seemed too appealing to resist.Giving into these biographic forces, she slept with the colleague, much toher own chagrin. Similarly, a young man had a negative biographic themethat involved neglecting his physical well-being in certain situations. Hesubjected an already injured back to additional stress rather than allowinghimself the time to rest because doing so would have meant thinkingabout the loss of an important relationship he could not bear to face.Unfortunately, this decision led to the development of a chronic illnessand continual pain. In both instances, the person took what at firstappeared to be the easy way out, failed to deal with the deeper challengelife presented in a way that demonstrated competence and worthiness,and subsequently suffered negative consequences, especially inauthenticityand a loss of self-esteem.The analysis of this type of self-esteem experience or momentinvolves a six-stage process that the individual goes through when facingsuch a major challenge of living, which we examine later in Chapter 5.The point here is that we do seem to be able to find evidence supportingthe position that self-esteem involves competence and worthiness at thelived level, in ways powerful enough to have a transforming effect onpeople. As before, this kind of work has also been done by others andsupports its conclusions, meaning that this third force in the psychologyof self-esteem is not just a collection of isolated findings. For example,Michael Jackson (1984) also looked at situations that involved intensebiographic conflicts and came to similar conclusions concerning theunique character of self-esteem. In short, we may say that there is empiricalevidence to support this definition of self-esteem.A PHENOMENOLOGICAL, MEANING-BASEDAPPROACH TO A TWO-FACTOR DEFINITIONThe two-factor approach to defining self-esteem seems to be more comprehensivetheoretically because it is capable of handling material fromeither of its single-factor counterparts. The approach also appears to bein a position to be more empirically accurate than the others when theyare examined at the lived level. Therefore, there is only one more taskthat needs to be completed before taking this way of defining self-esteemto the field. It is here that we will find whether this two-factor approachhas the power to make real advances in terms of generating insights orestablishing new levels of integration. This step involves fleshing the definitionout so that we can see what is meant by competence and worthiness,as well as how their relationship works to create self-esteem inpositive or negative ways. Phenomenological psychologists often use