Self-Esteem
SELF-ESTEEM: DEFINED AND A CONTEXT
Self-esteem is a term used in psychology to reflect a person's overall evaluation or appraisal of his or her own worth. Self-esteem encompasses beliefs; for example, "I am competent," and emotions such as: triumph, despair, pride and shame. Self-esteem can apply specifically to a particular dimension; for example, "I believe I am a good writer, and feel proud of that in particular," or it can have a global extent; for example, "I believe I am a good person, and feel proud of myself in general". Psychologists usually regard self-esteem as an enduring personality characteristic or a "trait." Self-esteem is distinct from self-confidence and self-efficacy both of which involve beliefs about ability and future performance. Synonyms or near-synonyms of self-esteem include:
* self-worth,[1]
* self-regard,[2]
* self-respect,[3][4]
* self-love (which can express overtones of self-promotion),[5] and
* self-integrity.
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1. Defined as "self-esteem; self-respect" in The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition, 2000.
2. Defined as "consideration of oneself or one's interests; self-respect" in The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition, 2000.
3. Defined as "due respect for oneself, one's character, and one's conduct" in The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition, 2000.
4.The Macquarie Dictionary. Compare The Dictionary of Psychology by Raymond Joseph Corsini. Psychology Press, 1999.
5. Defined as "the instinct or desire to promote one's own well-being; regard for or love of one's self" in The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition, 2000.
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For three pieces of writing, one by me, one by a professor of mathematics in Canada, and one a published article on the individual and community in relation to self-concept and meaning go to the following links:
http://bahai-library.com/hulme_community_diversity
http://www.thescienceforum.com/behavior-psychology/23909-mans-search-meaning
(readers should click on my name and then on the words "find all posts" to read more than 3 dozen posts)
http://bahai-library.com/hatcher_bw18_spirituality
SPIRITUALITY: A CONTEXT
Some of the content of the above article on spirituality is as follows:
1. No matter how strong the measure of Divine grace, unless supplemented by personal, sustained and intelligent effort it cannot become fully effective and be of any real and abiding advantage.-Shoghi Effendi in Baha'i Life, NSA of the Baha'is of Canada, p.6
2. The tension between the material and the spiritual in man is a creative tension purposely given by God, a tension whose function it is constantly to remind the individual of the necessity of making an effort in the path of spiritual growth.-William Hatcher, "The Concept of Spirituality," Baha'i Studies, Vol.11, p.4.
3. No man is capable of judging the spiritual or moral worth of any other individual since no other individual knows the endowments and circumstances of any individual. The degree of moral responsibility of any individual can not be judged by others. This has nothing to do with society's right to protect itself.-ibid.p.3
4. The process of spiritual growth involves: (a) learning how to make appropriate responses to various circumstances; (b) learning how to initiate certain kinds of actions, and (c) various kinds of educational processes. Spirituality is about learning what fosters spiritual development and knowing what inhibits it. Spirituality, then, is a cognitive discipline. Spirituality is about self-knowledge, about knowing one's limitations and capacities, and about learning how to conform one's behaviour to the standards set forth in the Baha'i writings. It is a gradual process.-ibid., p.3 to 11.
A NECESSARY INSTABILITY
The community should not be like a chain which is only as strong as its weakest link. It should, rather, be like a garment whose fibers, the warp and weft, may be ever so slender and numerous but intimately connected.-Ron Price with appreciation to Charles S. Pierce(1839-1914),
American philosopher, logician, mathematician, and scientist,in his Collected Papers 5.264.
Some see the meaning of life
As making a contribution to the community,
for here the creative personality
is born and matured;
it is the gift of evolution,
the ordering of inequality,
the integration of the individual,
where restraint and self-control
are part of self-esteem.
One day community feeling
will triumph over everything
that opposes it, as natural
to man as breathing,
the scientific inevitability
of social harmony
slowly overcoming the force
of antisocial dispositions
now so preponderant in the world,
at least in certain places.
Perhaps a Ciceronian stoicism
to start with and a widening
secular spirituality, as the blank page
whirls about in the winds of the spirit
and we come to understand cognition,
the social restraints
which limit our options,
define our choices
and generate what seems to us
as a restriction of potential.
Ron Price
26 June 1995
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MY DIARY AND SELF-ESTEEM
I have not followed the advice of the American author Evelyn Waugh who advised diarists not to write their opinions about life and art and especially about themselves. He suggested that they just “give the relevant facts”(1) and let readers make their own judgements. Nor have I followed the implications of the comment of T.S. Eliot on the writing of Henry James; namely, that 'He had a mind so fine no idea could violate it.'(2) If Eliot’s words here are the unlikely but ultimate compliment for an author, my writing would not receive it. All my writing is soaked with ideas as is my diary thusfar. “Readers will find disclosed in what I do write in my diary an active emotional investment in sympathetic and silent introspection, in pent-up feelings and unrealized wishes.
Readers will find, I trust, a balance between emotional excess and reserve, between effusions of hope and positive self-esteem on the one hand, and between self-critical comments and feelings of despair on the other. The phrase self-control rose in popularity through the 19th century but began to free fall around 1920 and cratered in the 1960s, the era of doing your own thing, letting it all hang out and taking a walk on the wild side. One's problem was no longer that one was profligate or dissolute, but that one was uptight, repressed, neurotic, obsessive-compulsive or fixated at the anal stage of psychosexual development. Hypomania, part of my BPD, is now considered by many in popular culture as a pleasantly grandiose, somewhat overactive feeling and behaviour orientation, but is often not considered as evidence of a disorder in psychiatric terms. My experience of hypomania is experienced as a lack of self-control. The wider culture in the West is increasingly characterized by the loosening of the boundaries of restraint and millions who, in generations gone before controlled their instinctual and impulsive, their spontaneous and natural, urges are now giving way to them. My more impulsive BPD nature could now be considered normative in some ways and certainly not a sign of a disorder: such are the changes in societal values and attitudes, behaviour and norms and their affect on the way a person like myself might come to view the manifestations of their BPD both now and earlier in my life. For a useful take on the concept of self-control and impulsiveness go to:http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/04/books/review/willpower-by-roy-f-baumeister-and-john-tierney-book-review.html?ref=books
I aim to write in the little diary that I have thusfar kept: frankness and familiarity, emotional honesty but little sentimentality, a moderate vitality of feeling not repression nor abandonment. That’s how I’d like to see my various entries; I leave it to readers to make their own particular assessments on what I have achieved and written there.-Ron Price with thanks to:(1) Evelyn Waugh, “A Review of Stephen Spender’s Autobiography,” Tablet, London, May 5th, 1951; and (2) "Interview with Joseph Epstein," Yale Review of Books, 2003.
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MENTAL ILLNESS AND SELF-ESTEEM
It is not my intent in this essay, this account of my experience of bipolar disorder over 7 decades to document the history of mental illness treatment in the last half century or indeed the long history before, say, the 1950s. This is far too big a task and quite inappropriate to my aims in my life-narrative. Nor is my aim to discuss the various approaches that I could have taken to my illness in any detail. My intention, as I pointed out in the introduction to what I have come to call my chaos-narrative, has several purposes among which is: (a) to help those with BPD to accept the idea that they have a medical a clinical disorder that may be recurrent and that produces symptoms that affect: mood, self-esteem, thinking, speech, activity, sleep, appetite as well as social and sexual behaviour; (b) to help those who read this to identify and label the specific symptoms that occur in their own lives; (c) to facilitate the acknowledgment that the most recent behavioural orientations and/or episodes of BPD in anyone’s life have an impact on the way the sufferer and their family members view that BPD; and (d) to identify and describe any change in the attitudes of those with BPD toward others and in the pattern of their relationship with the others during and after an episode of BPD and during the long story that is the life of a BPD sufferer.
In BPD episodes of depression occur alternately with manic or hypomanic episodes during which the mood becomes euphoric and labile, the capacity for deriving pleasure increases, behaviours aimed at deriving pleasure increase, energy and psychomotor activity, libido and self-esteem become elevated. Thus, the same domains are implicated in depression and mania, although the characteristic disturbance in emotional behavior within these syndromes appears opposite with respect to emotional valance. Thus the clinical manifestations of mood disorders would appear to implicate the cognitive, emotional and visceral functions.(Note: Readers wanting to read my 175 page, 75,000 word book on the subject of my life experience of bipolar disorder can google: RonPrice BPD)
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DROP BY DROP
Coleridge tended to identify closely with the self within...He was acutely sensitive to audiences...driven by a pronounced, at times pathological...dependency on others’ approval. His fears of offending, his uncertainties over his own motivations, his low self-esteem... -Charles J. Rzepka, The Self as a Mind: Vision and Identity in Wordsworth, Coleridge and Keats, Harvard UP, London, 1986, pp.100-101.
The secret of self-mastery is self-forgetfulness.
-’Abdu’l-Baha
Well, they are gone, and here I must remain,
in a prison I entered hardly knowing back then.
Such sweet-scented streams, fruits of luscious
delectation, bringing life to my world until
a final hour with fragrant memories; but
these strangers, so many, a myriad, exist in
another world, far beyond the deep beauty
of this emerald world of eternal wealth,
delighting in some withered bloom, in
some dark green file of long lank weeds
that nod and drip beneath the blue clay-stone.
They are gone and they’ve been going,
always going from the rose-garden of
this spirit where I planted my flowers
many summers ago. Content with
transient dust, they shall never see
the hyacinths of divine wisdom
springing from their heart: yet
I have the seeds, unplantable, it seems,
They wander on pining and hungering
in their own way, as we all do, with
sad and patient hearts: stoic, sometimes
happy, living in this yellow light with
the blue ocean, often silent, swimming.
Pale, they hang beneath the blaze where
hangs as well a transparent foliage and
where I watch some broad and sunny leaf
dappling beneath the sunshine, or some
deep radiance laying full on the ancient ivy.
And they travel busily to their destinations,
plant their gardens, love their families
as the rain falls upon the earth with the
branches dripping, drop by drop.
Ron Price
1 June 1995
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QUIETER PLEASURE
Burns enjoyed sex with a huge enjoyment; it was for him, perhaps, the most exciting element in human experience. He explored its emotional aspects in some of the most tender and passionate love lyrics ever written. He also produced remarkable lyrical comments on the purely physical aspects of the relations between the sexes. -David Daiches, Robert Burns: The Poet, Saltire Society, 1994(1950), p.274.
Price enjoyed sex: the quintessential physical sensation, he thought, without a doubt. He rarely explored the subject in personal terms in his poetry. He was not sure why. Perhaps, it was partly the excessive emphasis given to sex in his culture in the last four decades of the twentieth century; his reticence might also be due, he thought, to what might be called a puritanical reaction in middle class society to overt discussion of sex in social relationships, especially one's own. His disinclination to discuss his sex life may also have been due to a view that this was a private preserve and should be dealt with indirectly if at all. Finally, his own sexual frustrations over those same decades contributed in no small part to his relative poetic silence.-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Three Epochs, Unpublished Manuscript.
You saw love as passion, simple, clear.(1)
By the time I came to this posey I knew
that love was not passion, fascination for
the delights, joys, of groin or breast, hair,
leg or flesh. Yes, some language of the heart.
I'm with you there, but far removed from some
orgasmic flair where detumescence cools the care
and takes you down in the cold night air. Love is
clearly something quite else; we learn it so slowly
while we climb around on the shelf of our days
trying and sorting and bending our ways.
I wonder how much I'll have when I'm
finished my journey: enough for a cup or
a gallon measure when I'm living in Burnie(2)
and growing quite old with some quieter pleasure.
Ron Price
12 August 1998
1 Robert Burns
2 town on the northwest coast of Tasmania
