Honoring the Self

by Nathaniel Branden

  A period of painful self-examination may follow. Have I failed to perceive my assets and shortcomings realistically? As a romantic partner, do I have liabilities of which I may be unaware? Are there things I need to learn? Or is it simply the case that the romantic needs of the person I love are much better fulfilled by an individual who is different from me, different in ways that do not reflect on the worth of either one of us?

  But to decide that if I am not loved by a particular person I am devoid of worth is not to suffer a loss of self-esteem so much as to discover that my self-esteem is lower than I had realized.

  I want to offer one last example of how the level of self-esteem can affect our experience of love.

  One evening I was having dinner with a man in his mid-fifties who had been married nearly thirty years and who, for some years past, had become more and more unhappy and frustrated in his relationship with his wife. They had grown progressively apart in their values, interests, and preferred lifestyle. But throughout the marriage the man had been scrupulously faithful—until, two years earlier, he had met and fallen in love with another woman and proceeded to plunge into an ecstatic and tormented affair. The ecstasy came from the sense that in some important ways he had found that which he had been searching for in a woman for many years; the torment came from his guilt and indecision as to what to do concerning his marriage.

  He had three children, two of them married and the youngest in college. He did not seem terribly concerned by the impact of a possible divorce on his children; he seemed very concerned about the impact on his wife. “She’s never done anything really wrong,” he explained miserably. “I really don’t have much to reproach her for. I’m just not in love with her anymore. Do I have the right to make her suffer?”

  I pointed out, gently, that his wife was suffering now, as was the woman he was in love with. In fact, all three of them were suffering.

  “But she wants to remain married to me,” he lamented. “She knows our marriage isn’t right, she says she wants to work on it, and I don’t know what to tell her. The spark just isn’t there. With this other woman I feel alive as I’ve never felt alive before. I feel on fire. There are no words to describe the experience. It’s almost like a rebirth. I feel I can share myself with her as I never could with my wife. But do I have the right to place my own happiness first? Do I have the right?”

  When I asked if his wife knew about the other woman, he replied, “She suspects. And one of these days I’ll have to tell her the truth. This can’t go on. I dread hurting her. She’s such a good person. And I do love her—in a way. I really do. And she’s always been so loyal. She’s always stuck by me. I feel she always will.”

  I asked him if he felt equally secure with the other woman. “Not quite,” he sighed. “She’s more of a free spirit. She says she loves and adores me, but how can I be sure it will last? How can I be sure she’ll always be there? I’m positive my wife will always be there.”

  “You feel your wife will always love you?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he agreed. “And I don’t have to live with the fear that if she really got to know me she might fall out of love with me. We’re long past that. But the main thing is, with the other woman, the woman I really love, I’m happier than I’ve ever been. I walk around in a state of rapture. I feel like a schoolboy. I don’t know if I can trust this much happiness.”

  “You’re uncertain as to whether or not it will last.”

  “Uncertain … yes. It scares me. And yet, I tell myself the fear is ridiculous. It’s not as if it’s a one-month infatuation. We spend a great deal of time together. The relationship has already been tested in many ways—and we’ve come through successfully. I feel this woman understands me in ways no one has ever understood me before. And yet, the fear is there, the haunting question, Will she always love me? With my wife, that question doesn’t arise.”

  “I wonder whether, in addition to what you’re saying, any part of your consideration has to do with being a good boy. You know what I mean. A good boy doesn’t leave his wife for another woman.”

  “Oh, of course. Sometimes the guilt is overwhelming.”

  Hoping to help him clarify his feelings at a deeper level, I asked, “If your physician told you you only had six months to live, what would you do?”

  Without a moment’s hesitation, he replied, “I’d be out of the house today, and I’d spend those six months with the woman I love.”

  “And if the woman you love came to you and said that her physician had told her she had only six months to live? In that case, if you left your wife, you couldn’t even look forward to a lifetime with the other woman. What then?”

  “I’d want to spend every possible moment with her. To tell you the truth, with or without the other woman, the thought of spending the rest of my life with my wife makes me feel unbearably sad.”

  “Then I have only one thing to ask you,” I said. “What makes you think you have six months?”

  It seemed a logical question. We forget that we are mortal, and that those we care for are mortal. It is very easy to be reckless with life—and with love. We always imagine we will have time later to correct our mistakes. But what if we won’t?

  He looked at me and did not answer. He merely sighed and sank deeper into his chair.

  A year later, he and his wife were still together. He and the woman he loved were no longer romantically involved; he had broken off with her, as his wife had insisted when he told her of the affair.

  I have never been able to escape the conviction that had he a higher level of self-esteem, a greater conviction of his own lovability and of his right to be happy, the story would have ended differently. I do not know how it would have ended; I merely think it would have ended differently.

  Multiply this story by many unknown thousands, and you begin to see the kind of quiet tragedy that shaky self-esteem can generate in personal relationships.

  Do I mean to imply that no other factor but poor self-esteem is fundamental to this story? I do not; countless many other considerations were operative that my friend had not conveyed to me. I hardly wish to deny the complexities and ambiguities that often attend our choices. But having made this acknowledgment, I cannot help but see the specter of poor self-esteem hanging predominant over this story and its outcome.

  Why should honoring the self be so difficult? Why should self-alienation be almost the universal condition of humanity? And what is the road back to self and to self-esteem?

  Some of the answers to these questions are contained in the ground we have already covered. But there is more. We need, in a sense, to go back to the beginning—to the moment of birth—then trace some of the steps in the thrust toward selfhood and individuation.

  II

  The Struggle for

  Individuation

  8

  Evolving Toward Autonomy

  At birth, the self does not exist. What exists is, in effect, the raw material from which a self can develop. A newborn infant does not yet have a sense of personal identity; there is no awareness of separateness, not, at any rate, as we who are adults experience such awareness.

  To evolve into selfhood is the primary human task. It is also the primary human challenge, because success is not guaranteed. At any step of the way, the process can be interrupted, frustrated, blocked, or sidetracked, so that the human individual is fragmented, split, alienated, stuck at one level or another of mental or emotional immaturity. To a tragic extent, most people are stranded along this path of development.

  Nonetheless, the central goal of the maturational process is evolution toward autonomy. This is the essence of the separation-individuation process.

  Discovering boundaries, discovering where self ends and the external world (and in particular the mothering figure) begins—grasping and assimilating the facts of separateness—is the foremost task of early infancy, upon which normal development depends. The second and overlapping part of the maturational process is indivi
duation: the acquisition of those basic motor and cognitive skills, combined with a beginning sense of physical and personal identity, that represent the foundation of the child’s autonomy—that is, the child’s capacity for inner direction, self-regulation, and self-responsibility. Separation and individuation mark the child’s birth as a human being.49,50 They are the necessary precursors of well-developed self-esteem.

  Margaret Mahler, the pioneer researcher into the separation-individuation process, became interested in the stages by which a sense of identity is formed as a consequence of observing that “the psychotic child never attains a feeling of wholeness, or individual identity, let alone a sense of human identity,’ ” as she writes in The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant. She traces any number of psychological disorders to some partial failure or incompletion of the separation-individuation process. My usage of the term, however, departs from hers—becomes broader—at this point.

  In Mahler’s context, the separation-individuation process is meant to pertain exclusively to early childhood. I speak of separation and individuation as a process that has meaning at every stage of human development and manifests itself through the entire span of the life cycle. The process is inseparable from the development and maintenance of healthy self-esteem.

  We can thus think of separation as emergence and differentiation from any fundamental supporting matrix—be it mother, family, a given stage of development, identification with a particular job or career, an outmoded or unnecessarily limiting belief system. We can think of individuation in a sense perhaps closer to that intended by Jung, as the striving of the human organism toward wholeness, toward completion—an internal thrust toward self-realization or self-actualization reminiscent of Aristotle’s concept of entelechy. During the process of individuation, we become more and more completely that which we are potentially—expanding the boundaries of the self to embrace all of our potentialities, as well as those parts that have been denied, disowned, repressed.

  On a purely biological level, the birth process itself is the first instance of separation and individuation, a paradigm of the pattern that will later be manifest psychologically. The fetus initially exists as part, literally, of the mother’s body; then, at birth, it separates—differentiates—and comes into the world as a distinct individual entity. Until the fetus separates from the womb, leaving its first matrix, its first support system, it cannot exist as a (physically) separate being. It must, in effect, say good-bye to one level of existence before it can say hello to a more advanced level. In much the same way, we say good-bye to the “womb” of the family when we go out into the world on our own.

  The task of emergence confronts us continually in the course of our existence. We can see the basic pattern in a child’s successful growth to adulthood, from learning to walk to selecting a career and establishing a home and a life. But we can see the same process at work in the struggle of a woman who has overidentified with the role of mother and who, when her child is grown, confronts the challenging question of who she is now that her child no longer is dependent on her. When a marriage ends in divorce or when a life partner of many years dies and a person must encounter the question of his or her identity outside the context of the former relationship, once again what is involved is a process of emergence, of separation and individuation.

  Each stage of development in the life cycle contains its own hazards and challenges. The more appropriately our needs are met at a particular stage, the more prepared we are for the next stage.17,18,19,45 Again, let us consider the paradigm of the womb: If the experience of the fetus is positive, if its needs are met as nature requires, it is ready for separation and entrance into the world as a human being. If not, it brings the consequences of its unmet needs with it—for example, frailty or a predisposition to illness.43

  An appropriately nurtured infant is appropriately prepared for childhood; a child whose needs are appropriately met is well prepared for adolescence; successful negotiation of the transitions through adolescence paves the way for the beginning of adulthood; and so on.

  We can think of major stages of development, as self evolves, as a series of matrix shifts, a series of deaths and births, of good-byes and hellos, so that the maturational, intellectual, and psychological attainments at a given stage of development provide the energy, the thrusting power, for evolution to the next stage. We use these attainments to transcend them.

  As we have seen, the first matrix shift is birth itself; the next major shift is from mother to the world, occurring at about age seven. A growing knowledge of self and of the world, through a wide variety of interactions with persons and things, prepares the child for the possibility of independent physical survival. By adolescence, assuming development has proceeded successfully, the individual (mind/body) has become his or her own matrix. The next shift is from concrete thinking to increasingly abstract thinking, with mind itself as the highest matrix in this biological hierarchy.*

  There are those who would argue that there is a still further matrix shift—from mind to the Ultimate Ground of Being, or cosmic consciousness, or, to use Aldous Huxley’s phrase, “mind-at-large.” 38 This viewpoint will be discussed later in the book.

  If we think biologically—and the “biocentric” perspective is essential to my approach—then we can see that each matrix shift, each stage of development, entails movement toward greater autonomy. Autonomy does not mean self-sufficiency in the absolute sense. Autonomy pertains to a human being’s capacity for independent survival, independent thinking, independent judgment; it pertains to the extent to which the source of self-approval lies within rather than without—that is, within self rather than social environment. Autonomy consists of living by one’s own mind.

  To live by one’s own mind does not mean that we do not learn from others. It means that we do not attempt to live by unthinking conformity and the suspension of independent critical judgment. We take responsibility for the ideas we accept and the values by which we guide our actions.

  But this characterization of autonomy is still very abstract. While this is not a treatise on developmental psychology, and there is no need in this context to spell out the stages of development in detail, we do need to grasp, in a more concrete and specific way, some of the essentials of successful self-emergence.

  We shall touch on aspects of individuation from four perspectives: sexual, emotional, cognitive, and moral.

  In considering the sexual realm, I offer two brief psychotherapy vignettes by way of illustration.

  John was a thirty-one-year-old engineer who had come to therapy because of feelings of anxiety, confusion, and incompetence in relationships with women. He was a virgin. He professed a desire to be married and to have a family of his own and at the same time complained that women might as well be members of a different species, utterly incomprehensible to him.

  After we had gone through his history and had developed a rapport, we started on sentence-completion work. I explained that I would give him a number of sentence stems and that he was to keep repeating each stem, finishing the sentence in any way he wished, until I signaled him to stop, at which point we would move on to a new stem. We began with “Mother was always—.”

  Mother was always—

  Beautiful.

  Remote.

  Walking around the house in a negligee.

  Mysterious.

  Seductive.

  Telling me I was her “little man.”

  A little overwhelming.

  With mother I felt—

  Confused.

  Fascinated.

  Sometimes excited.

  I loved the smell of her.

  I wanted to be close.

  Good.

  I was special.

  I was her favorite.

  I was more important than father.

  Father was always—

  Quiet.

  Looking at me strangely.

  Scaring me without saying a word.

 
; Off somewhere.

  Looking at me as if he were just about to say something, but he never did.

  Passive and yet ominous.

  With father I felt—

  Frightened.

  Uneasy.

  Watchful.

  Sometimes defiant.

  I wanted us to be closer.

  I wanted us to be friends.

  I would have liked him to talk to me more.

  I wanted him to help me understand what a man was.

  This was enough to suggest that my client was in some sense stuck at a childhood phase of development that, in the Freudian system, is identified as the Oedipal stage. According to the Freudian theory of psychosexual development, to which I do not subscribe, every male and female child is destined to pass through what psychoanalysis describes as the oral, anal, phallic (or Oedipal), latency, and genital phases.24 Freud’s theory of psychosexual development was intended to trace the vicissitudes of the sexual energy that he posited and called libido and that he believed to be a prime force in all human behavior. In the Oedipal period, according to Freud, it is the universal fate of every male and female child to desire sexually the parent of the opposite sex and to wish for the death of the parent of the same sex. As a theory of development, it represents an unwarranted generalization; nonetheless, sometimes the problem does occur, and when it does, sentence-completion work as a means of establishing that fact is simpler and more rapid, reliable, and effective than any other approach of which I have knowledge—certainly more so than the techniques of free association and dream interpretation.*