>>>sentence stems - which is clinical -<<<
'Phenomenal' means data gathered directly fom the patient's verbal responses. (A) clinical (setting) does not alter the obvious theoretical issues, a part of which I explained in my previous post.
What I was saying is that sentence stems were not used for the purpose of eliciting research data, but had the purpose of aiding the client effect desirable change while doing the stems in a theraputic setting.
----------------- Then there's the question of exactly what 'self-esteem' is supposed to indicate, and if it's not actually a 'golden mean' concept in which having too much is just as bad as having too little.
It is not a golden mean concept. It's like the concept of good health - no such thing as too much. It is a gradient where the less you have the worse off you are, and the more you have the better off you are. The question of what, if any, the upper limit would be is something that research hasn't yet established. I suspect it will be much like the awakening in the medical community of what the upper limits of good health were when they started studying atheletes. --------------- For example, garden-variety interpretation of Rosenberg indicates high-risk taking as indicative of low self-esteem, while low risk behavoir indicates high self-esteem.
This would be a superficial analysis - one that failed to examine causality. Looking deeper would call for looking at the appropriateness of a given risk for the context of the person's situation, abilities, etc. And then, from that perspective researchers might start looking at why someone of low self-esteem took risks that were beyond their capacities, and why high self-esteem people had records of choosing risks that made sense for them in their context. People who are highly defensive (denial, avoidance, masking with impulsivity, etc.) often take risks that are either too low (hiding from reasonable risks) or take risks that aren't rational (addictive behaviors, gambling, over dramatizing life situations, etc.) ------------- ...i'm far more to agree with Branden than Locke that happiness is not only an indicator, but a goal.
Yes, and with some life forms, the simple pleasure-pain mechanism combined with some kind of memory and a limited level of learning works to guide them in ways that are, in effect, programmed by evolution for biological success. But with us humans, and our complex world of abstractions and the nature of our need to exercise some form of volition as we make decisions, form values, choose goals, and figure out the actions to get from here to there, we need something that works like a pleasure-pain mechanism but has to be much more complex, yet serves to select out those mental actions that will tend to lead to actions that support our flourishing. Self-esteem is a bit like that. If I were evolution, I'd do a riff on the pain-pleasure mechanism to make some self-esteem routines that were connected to mental operations instead of sensory input. That opens the door for volition which opens the door for massive increases in options available to the organism. We can choose to focus our consciousness in appropriate ways as opposed to engaging in denial or avoidance, or emotionalism, or rationalization, and it would make sense if evolution selected for a reward mechanism for that. We can see that assuming an appropriate amount of personal responsibility for our life instead of shirking it, would be a good mental operation to reward. We can see that treating those ideas we've cast as important values with integrity instead of tossing them out or turning on them - not out of logic or reason, but for bad reasons, would be a good thing to reward. We can see that being on our own side while accepting who and what we are as opposed to lying to ourselves, or being against our own success, or always painting ourselves in our own minds as inferior would be a good evolutionary strategy. If we see these (and other mental actions) as proper ways to use our minds as organisms that are oriented towards not just survival but flourishing, then we can also imagine that these methods could have positive or negative effects in how we experience ourselves. The alternative is to image that we have no volition, that everything is a product of hard determinism, that there is no evolutionary value in exercising reason, assertiveness, self-acceptance, etc. as opposed to curling up in corner afraid to take any action, or allowing any emotional impulse of the moment drive us. That is a very quick and incomplete explanation of how I see self-esteem. It is that positive experience of ourself as worthy, as lovable, as competent in a general way to meet what life throws at us. Because we have an emotional side, and because feeling states and emotions are motivational - our fuel to move forward - we can see self-esteem as an omnipresent background against which emotions that are short-term reactions, and feeling states, like longer lasting backgrounds, such as sadness over a loss, will have much to do with success. We can experience an emotional blow, say being fired from a job unexpectedly, and this could happen just months after the death of a parent causing a background feeling state of saddness. The ability of the person to pick themselves up and go on will then fall mostly on the fuel provided by self-esteem - a much longer term and more stable experience or sense of who we are.
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