About Psychology: Essays at the Crossroads of History, Theory, and Philosophy

6. Self-Esteem and the Demoralized Self: A Geneaology of Self Research and Measurement

89 Chapter Six Self-Esteem and the Demoralized Self A GENEAOLOGY OF SELF RESEARCH AND MEASUREMENT Scott Greer Ful wys is he that kan hym selven knowe. —Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales INTRODUCTION AND TECHNÉ ONE OF THE MOST ESSENTIAL and, ironically, problematic concepts for psychology is the concept of the “self.” While the self is a well known and traversed concept within the personality area, it is also an integral (if theoretically implicit) part of many psychological theories; aspects of social, health, abnormal, and clinical psychology, as well as others, are based on a Western conception of an individualized self. After a “disappearing act,” as 90 About Psychology Gordon Allport called it, during the heyday of behaviorism, the concept of “self” began to again permeate psychological discourse with the decline of behaviorism and the rise of more client-based practices that both appealed and applied to people’s experience. Since the late 1950s and early 1960s, self research has exploded in terms of the number of theories about the self, as well as the number of measures and tests of the self and self-related constructs . Kitano (1989) reported that over 30,000 articles included the term “self” in the title, about 6,500 of which specifically used “self-esteem,” clearly the most intensively studied area in self research. However, with all of this research activity, and with its central place among several areas in psychology, there is no consensus as to what terms such as self, self-concept, self-esteem mean or refer to, or how they should be defined within psychological research (Byrne, 1996; Hattie, 1992; Wylie, 1974, 1989). To make matters worse, even the use of the terms is inconsistent: some use “self” and “self-concept” interchangeably; others simply use either self or self-concept and do not differentiate between the two; and others still may use “selfconcept ” to mean “self-esteem.” This may be (or should be) somewhat surprising, considering how fundamental this concept is to psychology.Wylie (1968, 1974, 1989) and Byrne (1996) have noted this rather obvious omission and have repeatedly upbraided psychologists for failing to define these terms.What results, unfortunately, is a theoretical and terminological quagmire , and only recently have some psychologists begun to pay attention to their conceptual language (e.g., Byrne, 1996). Not only does the lack of a clear definition pose problems in interpreting the results of research, but coordinating results with other studies also becomes impossible. Furthermore , in the past 10 to 15 years, a growing number of writers have, on a theoretical level, questioned the validity of this frequented notion, calling our attention to its cultural and historical embeddedness and leaving the nagging feeling that there is no actual “self ” behind our discourse about it (e.g., Cushman, 1990; Gergen 1991). Thus it would seem that despite the fact that the notion of a self (as well as the related “self-concept” and “self-esteem”) has become a central part of Western identity, the abundance of empirical self research has failed to ascertain what the self is, or even if we actually have one. The self has been described as both “empty” and “saturated,” but as a viable concept for empirical research, it might be best described as “dead.” Although there is still a considerable amount of theoretical discussion regarding the self, the empirical literature all but ignores this concept, with most researchers considering it a “philosophical question” (Ross, 1992). With this discrepancy in mind, this chapter presents a genealogical study of the self to discover the reasons for its failure as an empirical target, taking the point of departure to be current self research. In discussing the evolution of Michel Foucault’s historiography, Dreyfus and Rabinow (1983) differentiate Self-Esteem and the Demoralized Self 91 between an “archaeology,” which is a more or less direct historical analysis of discourse and praxis, and a “genealogy,” which emphasizes the conditions that limit, enable, or otherwise alter the context under which a particular discourse is made possible.This notion and use of “genealogy” are based on the work of Nietzsche (e.g., Genealogy of Morals, 1887/1968), which has more recently been taken up by Foucault (e.g., Discipline and Punish, 1977). In a similar Foucauldian vein, Nikolas Rose (1988, 1996) and Philip Cushman (1995) have also presented genealogical analyses of the importance and influence of social and economic context upon the...