The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem
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4 Charles Garfield. Second to None. Homewood, Ill.: Business One Irwin, 1992.
5 Warren Bennis. On Becoming a Leader. New York: Addison-Wesley, 1989.
Chapter 17:
Self-Esteem and Culture
1 Mary Kawena Puku’i. ’Olelo No’eau. Honolulu: Bishop Museum Press, 1985.
2 Margaret Mead. Coming of Age in Samoa. New York: New American Library, 1949.
3 G. Rattray Taylor. Sex in History. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1973.
4 Jonathan Rauch. “A Search for the Soul of Japan.” Los Angeles Times Magazine, March 8, 1992.
5 Harold Bloom. The American Religion. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992.
6 Christopher Lasch. “In Defense of Shame.” The New Republic, August 10, 1992.
Acknowledgments
I wish to express my appreciation to my editor, Toni Burbank, for the energy and enthusiasm she brought to this project and for many helpful suggestions.
Thanks also to my literary agent, Nat Sobel, for his unstinting support and dedication.
While working on this book, I showed different sections of it to a number of colleagues who were exceptionally generous in the thoughtfulness of their feedback, queries, suggestions, and challenges. Specifically, thanks to: Dr. Cherie Adrian, Dr. Warren Bennis, Dr. Warren Farrell, Joe Feinstein, Don Gevirtz, Leonard Hirshfeld, Pete Lakey, Ken Miller, Dr. Jim O’Toole, Robert Reasoner.
And finally, my love and gratitude to my wife, Devers, for her excitement about the book, the stimulation of our discussions about it, and the provocative ideas she often provided.
* One difficulty with much of the research concerning the impact of self-esteem, as I said in the Introduction, is that different researchers use different definitions of the term and are not necessarily measuring or reporting on the same phenomenon. Another difficulty is that self-esteem does not operate in a vacuum; it can be hard to track in isolation; it interacts with other forces in the personality.
* My only reservations concerning the first two of these books are (1) psychoanalytic orientation in some of Ginott’s comments that I do not share; (2) a puzzlingly evasive treatment of the issue of masturbation, and (3) a dated, traditional perspective on male and female roles. These issues are minor, however, in light of what the books have to offer.
* I omit here certain experiences of anxiety and depression whose roots may be biological and may not fully fit this definition.
* Peter Drucker has written the classic text on how this is to be done: Innovation and Entrepreneurship.
* Appendix B contains a thirty-one-week sentence-completion program specifically designed to build self-esteem.
* For a critique of pharmacologically oriented psychiatry, see Toxic Psychiatry by Peter R. Breggan (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991).
* For an excellent discussion of “men’s story,” see Warren Farrell’s The Myth of Male Power (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993).