The Myth of Self-Esteem: Finding Happiness and Solving Problems in America (review)

The Myth of Self-Esteem: Finding Happiness and Solving Problems in America. By John P. Hewitt. St. Martin's Press, 1998. 153 pp. Cloth, $29.95.

The question occurs the moment you spot the title of John P. Hewitt's slim think piece. Are we in for yet another assault on self-esteem? It seems, as he his fond of reminding us, that American's are obsessed like no others with self-esteem. But his goal is not necessarily to debunk and redirect. He aims instead to "unravel the assumptions that are built into the contemporary usage and understanding of the idea of self-esteem and build a more complete picture of this phenomenon and the importance we attribute to it." He pursues his goal by first asking us to suspend our "belief in self-esteem as an established scientific fact." This is necessary because Americans resist considering "the possibility that it may not be as universal a quest as we imagine" and because "the reader should step back from this commonplace word and regard self-esteem not as a phenomenon that can be studied scientifically but as something people, including social scientists, believe."

To be sure, Hewitt is not necessarily arguing that self-esteem is itself a fiction (although the casual reader could draw this conclusion). Rather, it has taken on or been saddled with a cadre of pundits, charlatans, self-help gurus, scholars, policymakers, and fuzzyheaded and occasionally irresponsible do-gooders (especially in education) ready, one way or another, to cash-in or otherwise capitalize on its singular popularity in American society. According to Hewitt, self-esteem's proprietors are its advocates, critics, and debunkers alike; while its main nonacademic consumers are a rather gullible and sometimes venal public simultaneously duped and duplicitous (but also sometimes earnest) in their belief in the myth of self-esteem. The proprietors form two broad camps: those who worship in the House of Self-Esteem and proclaim its palliative or curative powers ("conceptual entrepreneurs") and those impelled to kick the door in and save everyone inside from the mollycoddlers of homo Americanus.

Unfortunately this opinionated, flawed, though sometimes insightful book does little to clarify or advance our understanding of self-esteem as a cultural phenomenon or a scientific fact. The principle reason is an unresolved tension in the book's form and structure exacerbated by attempting to do too much in too few pages with too little attention to useful detail. His cultural exegesis is undermined by a witting or unwitting penchant for critiquing self-esteem's correctness, a goal he and the reader were presumably not to pursue here. Also, while he starts with a solid and clever thesis (belief in self-esteem is worth studying) and he ends with an intriguing though underdeveloped notion of self-esteem as interpreted mood, he offers limited original evidence to meaningfully support either. He often leaps to broad generalizations that are, most often, inadequately explored or documented with the extant literature or data. He asserts, for example, that there is broad agreement among "educationists" that self-esteem is an entitlement "which need not be earned or justified" while feeling good about oneself is "as important a goal of teaching as any other educational outcome." These ideas have led people (especially subscribers to the educational theory of self-esteem) to believe that it is "acceptable and desirable to be preoccupied with oneself, praise oneself, dissociate self-esteem from behavior or group membership, and regard acceptance by self and others as a basic human need."

Several misplaced asides and allegations give the book the ring of an extemporaneous undergraduate lecture constructed, for dramatic emphasis, from other myths or unsubstantiated opinions. For example, in a passage on individualism and American westward expansion we read that people were encouraged "to believe that when you could see the smoke from your neighbor's chimney, it was time to move...