Ernest Becker
The Birth and Death of Meaning
(1970)
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Chapter Seven
SELF-ESTEEM
The Dominant Motive of Man
"The supreme law [of life] is this: the sense of worth of the
self shall not be allowed to be diminished."
Alfred Adler
(in Ansbacher, 1946, p. 358)
... Whenever psychoanalysts talked about motives they seemed most fallible:... ...people were just not baboons; and even though they entirely lacked self-knowledge, they felt lingering doubts about psychoanalytic interpretations of their deeper desires. Psychoanalysts, of course, seized upon this rebellion as an example of denial based on repression:...
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... And so it went, and still goes, in large part, in "orthodox" Freudian analysis. ...
...if instincts do not drive man, what then, does? ...Alfred Adler... broke with Freud very early on this problem, when he very clearly saw... that the basic law of human life is the urge to self-esteem. ...
Self-esteem, as the psychoanalysts say, begins for the child with the first infusion of mother's milk,... Self-esteem becomes the child's feeling of self-
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warmth that all's right in his action world. It is an inner self-righteousness that arms the individual against anxiety. ...it is the durational extension of an effective anxiety-buffer. the seemingly trite words "self-esteem" are at the very core of human adaptation. They do not represent an extra self-indulgence, or a mere vanity, but a matter of life and death. ...
...the entire early training period of the child is one in which he learns to switch modes of maintaining self-esteem. ...his vital sentiment of self-value no longer derives from the mother's milk, but from the mother's mouth. It comes to be derived from symbols. ...the child's basic sense of self-value has been largely artifcialized. His feeling of human worth has become largely a linguistic contrivance. And it is exactly at this point that we deem that he has been socialized or humanized! ...
Once this has been achieved the rest of the person's entire life becomes animated by the artificial symbolism of self-worth; almost all his time is devoted to the protection, maintenance, and aggrandizement of the symbolic edifice of his self-esteem. ...
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