Pride, Shame, and Self-Acceptance
Revisiting some of the concepts that changed the way I thought about the self
What’s our biggest problem? Low self-esteem or too much self-esteem? Are we too down on ourselves or too arrogant? Are we dirty sinners or unfortunate victims? Writers and thinkers have wrestled for centuries with the question of human nature and our biggest issues. The early Christian theologian St. Augustine was a defender of “original sin,” the idea that every human being is deeply flawed, regardless of class or social context. Many since have championed such a view, while others, particularly more contemporary scholars, find original sin an ancient and outdated dogma that we need to shed. In its place, we need a positive view of the self—a way of affirming the innate goodness in human beings and attending to the contexts, structures, and traumas that compel people to act the way they do. If we only had the ideal environment and received the right parenting and so forth, we would naturally be benevolent agents in the world.
It's hard not to generalize here since there is so much nuance and complexity with these issues, but broadly, these two views prompt a big question: is our main problem loving ourselves too much (Augustine) or hating ourselves too much (positive psychology, contemporary assumption)? Are we too proud or too ashamed?
Karen Horney (pronounced Or-nay) was a twentieth-century psychologist who was deeply intrigued by this question. Having studied under Sigmund Freud, she developed her own unique thought regarding the human self, neuroticism, and the idea of “pride.” Horney developed a concept she called the “idealized self.” In a nutshell, Horney argued that people create a false, grandiose self in response to childhood vulnerability, or what American theological Reinhold Niebuhr might call “basic anxiety.” In a world where we are finite and vulnerable, we develop the idealized self to cope with the world around us. It sounds innocent enough, but Horney wanted to explore how this idealized self would come to relate to the “real” self—the one that has limitations, problems, and weaknesses. The result is conflict. The ideal self, the person we think we “should” be, or have to be in order to be acceptable, always runs up against the shortcomings and immaturities of the real self. Eventually, the real self becomes suppressed, and the human personality starts to dissolve.
Terry Cooper wrote an interesting book called Sin, Pride, & Self-Acceptance arguing that Horney’s work synthesizes this ongoing debate over pride and shame. For Horney, self-worship and self-hatred are two sides of the same coin. In summarizing some of Horney’s key concepts, Cooper writes,
Trying to live within the idealized self’s restrictive, rigid conception of life always involves enormous denial. We begin to avoid aspects of our own experience that do not conform to our elevated image of ideal personhood … The actual self, consisting of our real feelings and experience, becomes twisted, distorted and stretched into a mold of the “appropriate self.”
Cooper goes on to quote Horney:
Roughly speaking, a person builds up an idealized image of himself because he cannot tolerate himself as he actually is … He wavers between self-adoration and self-contempt, between his idealized image and his despised image, with no solid middle ground to fall back on.
Horney turns the mainstream idea of “pride” on its head. Even the nicest, most self-effacing people can suffer from an ideal self that never allows them to feel anger, sadness, or personal desire. Their ideal tells them that they should be morally perfect and advanced. If the ideal self for a teenage girl must always look like the Instagram model, she’ll always hate her own body. If the ideal self is supremely intellectual and wise, any trace of ignorance will be censored. For Horney, we all have a “pride system” that can fluctuate between both self-obsession and self-hatred and if we’re not careful, it will control our lives.
