Authenticity and Self-Esteem

Christina Hoff Sommers, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and Dr. Sally Satel, a practicing psychiatrist and Yale University School of Medicine lecturer, examine these matters in their book One Nation Under Therapy/ How the Helping Culture Is Eroding Self-Reliance. Daniel N. Robinson, distinguished professor emeritus at Georgetown University, finds the Sommers/Satel book revealing in examining the decline of the stoic, self-reliant individual who characterized America from around 1600 to sometime after World War II. People in a personal crisis today are often “helped” so much by swarms of counselors and other well wishers that the individual is often afforded little chance of learning to stand on his own. He fails to form the strength to confront what the American essayist and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson calls “the rugged battle of fate.”

In therapy sessions individuals in trouble are encouraged to reveal their true selves as a means for coming to terms with their difficulties. But Satel and Sommers find that if the individual is pressed to expose and deal with his real self, the real self is not what will be revealed. What will be asserted as the self is only a manufactured performance for public display that the troubled self hopes to pass off as its real self. Robinson summarizes the Sommers-Satel book as showing that what we must convey to these sufferers is not how to improve their performance but “the cost of living life as if it were a performance.”

Evaluation of the “performance” that is presented as the real self is often centered on the “authenticity” of what is being expressed. The theory is that if the performance presented is “authentically” that of the presenter that is all that is required. The reward is something called “self-esteem.” The director of an Oakland California singing contest reports on the effect when a contestant relies on “authenticity” to support his or her performance given to achieve recognition and self-esteem. The presentations of many contestants were so bad they could not carry a tune. Their lyrics were fractured and senseless. As they sat waiting their turn to audition it did not occur to these contestants to compare what they could do to the best they were hearing. There is no “best” (or worst) when authenticity and self-esteem are the controlling values.