Self-Esteem Does Not Begin With Us: It Is Built Through the Eyes of Others

A baby is not born concerned about its own worth. It does not come into the world wondering whether it is good enough, beautiful enough, intelligent enough, loved enough, or worthy enough. A baby does not have a self-esteem problem. It has a survival problem.

At the beginning, there is primarily tension.

Hunger. Cold. Discomfort. Absence. Pain.

The baby does not yet possess the psychological resources necessary to understand what is happening to it, much less to resolve on its own the state of tension that overwhelms its body. And so it cries.

Crying is not a reflection on suffering. It is a discharge, an appeal, a form of communication that precedes words:

“Something is wrong, and I cannot resolve this on my own.”

Then something happens.

Someone appears.

Someone picks the baby up, feeds it, warms it, rocks it, touches it, speaks to it. The tension decreases. Distress finds the possibility of satisfaction.

And this experience leaves a mark.

It creates memory. It creates expectation. It begins to establish a psychological pathway: when suffering arises, there is something in the world capable of responding to it.

But the opposite can also happen.

The baby cries and no one comes. Or someone unpredictable appears. Sometimes there is a response, sometimes there is not. Sometimes suffering is received and soothed; at other times, it is ignored.

Long before a child has the words to think about itself, the psyche begins to register fundamental experiences:

• When I suffer, does the world respond?
• When I need someone, does anyone come?
• When I exist, am I received?

But no single experience determines who we are. One unanswered cry does not automatically create a lifelong wound, just as one embrace does not guarantee a psychologically healthy life.

The matter is far more complex.

How does a child, through thousands upon thousands of experiences, gradually construct an idea of who they are?

Winnicott gave us an extraordinary formulation: “There is no such thing as a baby” — meaning that we cannot think about the baby in isolation from the caregiving environment. At the beginning, there is baby-and-caregiver, a relationship of such profound dependence that psychological development takes place within it.

Before self-esteem, there is something even more fundamental: continuity of being.

Before “I like myself”, there is:

“I exist.”

And, for a while, existing is enough.

Through the repetition of good-enough experiences, the child gradually acquires the possibility of feeling that they can exist spontaneously, desire, play, explore, and occupy a place in the world without constantly having to justify their own existence.

Later, however, different questions begin to emerge.

• Who am I?
• What do others expect from me?
• What must I be in order to be loved?
• What happens when I disappoint others?
• What must I do to be recognised?

It is within this territory that what we call self-esteem begins to acquire a history.

Self-esteem is not simply an amount of love we carry inside ourselves. It is also a narrative we construct about who we are. And that narrative is never entirely individual.

No one becomes themselves alone.

We learn something about ourselves through the eyes of others. First, through those upon whom we depend; later, through family, school, friends, love, rejection, success, failure, and culture.

The value we attribute to ourselves is gradually constructed within these relationships.

And here something remarkable happens: the way others see us may change, reality may change, but the way we see ourselves does not always change with it.

A child may have been regarded as incapable and grow into an extremely competent adult, yet still secretly feel incapable.

Someone may have grown up believing that they needed to please others in order to be loved and, decades later, still find themselves unable to say no.

A person may be admired by hundreds of people and yet continue searching inwardly for the approval of the one person from whom they could never obtain it.

Because we do not live only in relation to who we are.

We also carry an image of who we believe we should be.

This is where Freud becomes particularly important. Between the Ego we are and the ideal we have constructed, a painful distance can emerge. The more impossible that ideal becomes, the more easily our inner life turns into a permanent evaluation.

• I should be better.
• I should have achieved more.
• I should be more attractive.
• I should be more intelligent.
• I should be stronger.
• I should be more loved.
• I should have a different life.

And what we call low self-esteem can become a kind of permanent internal courtroom.

There is a judge.

There is an accusation.

There is an impossible ideal presented as evidence.

And there is a defendant who can never be acquitted: ourselves.

This is precisely where psychoanalysis differs from certain simplified versions of the contemporary discourse on self-esteem.

The aim of analysis is not to convince the analysand that they “have value”.

Repeatedly telling someone “you are worthy”, “you need to love yourself more”, or “you need to believe in yourself” may be well-intentioned, but it does not necessarily address the fundamental question.

The analytic question is different:

• How was this way of seeing yourself constructed?
• Where did this demand come from?
• Whose voice is this?
• When did you begin to believe that you had to be this way in order to deserve love?
• What would happen if you stopped trying to live up to that ideal?

These questions may initially produce a certain sense of strangeness because we are accustomed to thinking of self-esteem as something that simply needs to be increased.

But reality does not magically change because we begin to think positively about ourselves.

We can stand in front of a mirror and repeatedly tell ourselves that we are wonderful while remaining subject to exactly the same internal judge.

Analysis seeks something deeper: to understand the history of that judge.

We do not simply teach someone to “have self-esteem”.

We help them understand how they learned to measure their own worth, which relationships participated in that construction, which ideals they internalised, and why they continue to obey them.

Perhaps sufficiently healthy self-esteem does not mean waking up every morning convinced that we are extraordinary.

Perhaps it is something much simpler — and much more difficult:

being able to exist without being permanently on trial.

Psychoanalysis does not need to turn the analysand into an admirer of themselves.

Perhaps it is enough to help them transform their relationship with themselves so that it is no longer a courtroom.