The Components of Our Psychology

This month’s post is an excerpt from my 2019 book Independent Judgment and Introspection, pp. 88–99. Light edits and the omission of some paragraphs and all footnotes have been made.
 
 
Core Evaluations. Core evaluations are fundamental subconscious conclusions (evaluations) formed in childhood about ourselves, other people, and the world in general (reality). They are held as self-evident truths and operate as automatized habits to influence our future development and present actions. Self-esteem is formed as a cluster of core evaluations, based on our mental choices and physical actions over time, plus other less fundamental, mid-level evaluations. Specifically, self-esteem is our conviction of worthiness and efficacy. Sense of life is the emotional sum and expression of our core evaluations and self-esteem.
 
Core evaluations are “few in number—probably less than ten,” says [psychologist Edith] Packer (pp. 4–5), formed early in life usually by emotional generalization, not conscious choice. Core evaluations are then held subconsciously to influence our future. And all of us are capable of holding, and often do hold, contradictory core evaluations, correct and rational ones along with those that are mistaken. “Mistaken core evaluations,” continues Packer, “are at the root of all defense mechanisms and most out-of-context emotions. They are at the base of all neurosis.” Core evaluations are the “autopilots” of our lives, habits and standing orders for good or ill, that guide the way we process new experiences, make choices, and act.
 
Emotional generalization, to further elaborate the process, begins with reactions to specific events, say, a father yelling at and calling his son a klutz (or worse) for spilling a glass of milk. The child may feel fear and anxiety for having done something wrong and probably hurt at the way his father reacted to the objectively harmless event. Similar events repeated over time, may lead the child (the child’s subconscious integrating actions) to generalize the fear and hurt to other people, such as teachers, and in adulthood, to all other people he comes in contact with. The integrating actions, unexamined by the young child, see similarities between father, teachers, and others who yell. A core evaluation becomes established in the subconscious and automatized as, perhaps, “I can’t do anything right. I must be careful around other people.”
 
It is important to emphasize and to clarify that this is not environmental determinism. The child could have reacted differently to the spilled milk and name-calling father. And some children do react differently in such situations, by saying to themselves, for example, “What’s the big deal? I didn’t do it on purpose. Father is being ridiculous!” Better teaching—of the parents, teachers, and other adults who yell at children and call them names when they make mistakes—would go a long way in countering the development of this and other similarly negative core evaluations. The adult needs to help the child process the event, not make the situation and the child’s psychology worse. Haim Ginott’s advice (chap. 2*), paraphrased, is appropriate here: “Oh, the milk spilled. Here’s a sponge. Let’s clean it up and get you another glass.” 
 
The ease with which children can draw mistaken conclusions indicates how important it is for their parents and other adults to be there for them, to support them, by finding out what is going on in their minds. In particular, they need to help children put words to their emotions by identifying the thoughts and evaluations that stand behind the feelings. This requires trust and intimacy. Unfortunately, says Packer (pp. 10, 12), “most children do not share many of their important thoughts and emotions with their parents,” or other adults. Core evaluations, both good and bad, build up brick by brick as “hundreds and hundreds” of concrete experiences.
 
The significance of core evaluations is that our subconscious applies them in the present to every new concrete experience remotely similar to the ones that gave rise to the core evaluation in the first place, “without our permission in the present,” to quote Packer’s choice words (p. 7).
 
Self-Esteem. Self-esteem is the degree of confidence or certainty we have in ourselves as a valuable person and as someone competent to correctly and rationally choose values and actions to make us happy in life. The two interacting and reinforcing components of self-esteem are worthiness and efficacy. Both are mental, that is, psychological, not existential or physical as in our high or low competence in changing a tire, though existential competencies derive from and are influenced by the mental ones.
 
The worthiness component of self-esteem is our certainty that we are valuable to ourselves, that we are our own highest value. Self-worth and self-respect are synonyms. This makes worthiness fundamentally egoistic; demands for self-sacrifice undercut it. If we value ourselves highly, we can easily value ourselves in addition as capable of being valued, that is, loved, by others. The source of this self-worth initially comes from the infant’s mother, then also from the father and other significant adults in the child’s surroundings. Holding and touching, plus verbal expressions of love, interact with the infant’s self-esteem to provide the warmth and security that young, as well as older, children need.
 
This means that around age two—the “terrible twos”—when children begin to assert themselves (sometimes opposing adults, sometimes just asserting their developing self-confidence), verbal abuse, such as yelling, name-calling, and irrational commands like “don’t be selfish,” plus physical abuse, including spanking by hand, are often experienced by the child as humiliating, or even threatening. These traditional techniques of child-rearing are the primary early influences that lead children to develop negative core evaluations, especially self-doubt about themselves, but also fear of others, and confusion or even negative conclusions about the world in which they live. Today’s permissive directionless parenting is just as bad, if not worse, because of the psychological chaos it creates.
 
The efficacy component of self-esteem is cognitive competence, the certainty that we can and do perform the actions necessary to use our minds properly, to identify rational values and act to acquire them. “Actions necessary to use our minds properly” means an unconditional commitment to reason and facts. This commitment requires us to monitor the contents and functioning of our conscious and subconscious minds. It means introspection to identify the nature, meaning, and cause of our emotions, which ultimately means to identify and correct any mistaken core and mid-level evaluations. Introspection must continue throughout our lives.
 
The two components of self-esteem influence and reinforce each other, so a high self-worth encourages and supports strong competency, and vice versa. Alternatively, low self-worth undercuts our competencies, and vice versa. High self-esteem is an accomplishment that has to be earned over many years and sustained with persistent monitoring. It is not experienced as a brag or boast, for example, as Packer puts it (p. 230), “Boy, I’m a great, worthy [and competent] person.” That is not self-esteem. “Rather, self-esteem is experienced as a total emotional state” that gives us “a certain calm and a sense of control—as if the most important issues about [ourselves are] settled.” Self-esteem is a quiet confidence. Its emotional expression is pride.
 
If put into words, a healthy self-esteem would say something to the effect, “I am confident that I am valuable to myself and others, deserving to be loved—by myself and others—as the honest and independent person I am. I am also competent to use my mind in a correct, rational way to make me happy in life.”  In Packer’s words (p. 230), self-esteem says, “I am basically fit for life. I do not have to doubt that fact.” Doubting oneself, or self-doubt, is expressed as the emotion of anxiety. Anxiety then is what generates our need for defensive maneuvers to defend against the unpleasant feeling.
 
Sense of Life. Core evaluations and self-esteem determine who we are as individuals. Sense of life expresses our identity as an emotional sum, a composite set of emotions that outwardly expresses our outlook on life. As Ayn Rand says (pp. 25-26), it is a “pre-conceptual equivalent of metaphysics.” Metaphysics studies the fundamental nature of reality and our place in it, so the “pre-conceptual” part of our sense of life is our core evaluations from childhood formed through emotional generalizations that express who we are and what we think about other people and the world in which we live. Sense of life, according to Rand, “becomes a generalized feeling about existence, an implicit metaphysics with the compelling motivational power of a constant, basic emotion—an emotion which is part of all [our] other emotions and underlies all [our] experiences” (italics Rand's).
 
Sense of life is what an artist projects in a work of art and what patrons of the arts respond to. If it could be put into words, a sense of life would say, from the artist’s perspective, “this is life as I see it,” and from the patron’s viewpoint, “this is how I do or do not see life.” Sense of life attracts and repels, so sense of life is what one falls in love with, or does not fall in love with. Sometimes, in experiencing an instant like or dislike of someone we meet, it is our sense of life meshing or clashing with the other person’s sense of life.
 
Sense of life, however, it must be emphasized, is a composite emotion and emotions are not infallible. Getting to know another person, whether as a friend or romantic partner, requires time and patience to explore and learn all of the other person’s values, ranging from the philosophical and abstract to the everyday and concrete. Judging another person is even more difficult. Judging whether another person is honest and independent requires close interaction before a reliable conclusion can be drawn. Sense of life only gives clues, both to one’s own subconscious and to that of others.
 
 
* I seem to have inadvertently changed Ginott’s example from “juice” to “milk.”