| | Having studied under Branden while doing my internship towards my therapist's license, I can say that he was appalled at the wide spread misunderstandings of what self-esteem is. His launch of self-esteem was clear, concise and comprehensive and he carries NO responsibility for the things people made up over the years. He published and spoke again and again to correct popular misconceptions. It is as wrong to tie Nathaniel Branden's name to misconceptions about self-esteem as it would be to tie Adam Smith's name to people's misconceptions about free markets.
The big push in the school system by politicians that were enamored of what they thought was self-esteem was well-intensioned but on the wrong track. It was based upon the idea that you or someone else can create self-esteem just using positive affirmations or self-descriptions. You can no more acquire self-esteem that way, then you could acquire muscles or lose weight by talking nice to yourself. Branden was always very clear about that. The studies that followed and indicted 'self-esteem' as a failed policy were based upon that misunderstanding of what self-esteem actually is.
The youtube video put up Trun-the-racist is just a cheap ad hominem attack on Branden. Trun's grasp of self-esteem is so thin as to be non-existent - he actually thinks that one can "have self-esteem even if it is a false appraisal of ones self." And he implies this is what Branden promoted.
He gets pretty wacky when he decides he has the knowledge or credentials to address the issue of self-esteem, declaring it to be a dangerous dissociation from reality and a tendency towards emotionalism. He drones on in his strange monotone telling us that it equates to narcissism, showing Trun's failure to understand even the most basic dynamics of personality structures or disorders.
Trun's abysmal video goes on to say that the people who report the highest self-esteem have the lowest education, lowest levels of achievement, most spousal abuse, etc. He doesn't tell you that the "measure" of self-esteem used for the 'study' was nothing more than a self-report. That's right, they asked people in prisons, schools, and elsewhere, to say if they thought they were worthy... or some such question and ranked them on a Likert scale. People who have no understanding of what self-esteem is, have no idea how to accurately measure how much self-esteem a subject possesses. Somehow it escapes Trun's attention that people who feel inferior often compensate by claiming to be better than they are, but that they don't believe it and their false claims certainly aren't evidence of real self-esteem.
After that the video devolved into a racial comparison of which race did what and my distaste level grew to high to make it worth continuing. --------------------
I'd like to repeat that Brad Trun should be banned from RoR. He uses the site to pimp for his racist videos on Youtube and that's not appropriate. --------------------
"Arrogance, boastfulness, and the overestimation of our abilities reflects underdeveloped self-esteem rather than, as some people imagine, too much self-esteem." Nathaniel Branden
(Edited by Steve Wolfer on 12/16, 3:28pm)
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