ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights the people who present themselves as shamefully lacking in self-esteem and deals with their treatment. The people who suffer from conscious low self-regard tend to collaborate with feeling shame, or the sense of inadequacy and inferiority. In My Mother, Andre Gide allows us entry into the mind of an exquisitely sensitive young man as he watches his mother cope with her unsteady self-esteem. Gide recognizes that those with self-esteem deficits yearn for acceptance and may fall back on slavish imitation, bartering away their potential uniqueness in the hope that this will win them a good approval rating. Irwin Hoffman presents an intriguing therapeutic possibility. He has developed the technique of modulating his patient's self-criticism by becoming a non-critical internalized object. He aims to alter the patient's inner dialogue by inserting his voice into it. Thus he says the treatment of the patient is predicated on their mutual understanding of the history that created the deficit.
