Resilient Identities: Self, Relationships and the Construction of Social Reality

Once considered the province of New Age groups, the self-esteem movement has been catapulted into the American mainstream, with a California task force and other groups now claiming that raising self-esteem is the panacea for social ills from alcoholism to poor grades and poverty. In this wide-ranging and strikingly original book, William Swann not only dissects the mistaken assumptions that underlie current self-esteem programs, but also incisively analyzes the nature of self-worth and the self-traps that make achieving and sustaining a sense of self-esteem so difficult. Drawing on more than a decade of research, much of it his own, Swann reveals the surprising regularity with which people suffering from low self-esteem gravitate to relationships in which they are denigrated or abused. Swann shows how such people are caught in a crossfire of conflicting desires for praise and for confirmation of their negative self-views. He persuasively argues that our feelings of self-worth can only be understood as part of a larger, intricate dynamic involving society as well as the self. Not a self-help book, Resilient Identities offers a fascinating, controversial exploration of how self-esteem conflicts develop and are played out in all of our relationships. And it discusses what we can do to encourage and sustain feelings of self-worth in our society.