Author
Nathaniel Branden
The psychotherapist who made self-esteem a subject and then spent decades defending the strict version of it.
1 book on BookYol
The story and the impact
Nathaniel Branden was a psychotherapist and writer, born in 1930, who in his early years was closely associated with Ayn Rand before building an independent career in psychology.
The Psychology of Self-Esteem, published in 1969, helped make the term a subject; The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem in 1994 summarised a career of clinical work into six practices and became the standard reference for the stricter definition, self-esteem as competence and worthiness earned by practice rather than declared.
He developed sentence-completion as a therapeutic tool, wrote some twenty books, and died in 2014.
The signature
Branden writes with a philosopher's precision and a clinician's examples: a definition, its implications, then the sentence-completion exercises that put it to work. His signature is the six pillars as disciplines rather than feelings, and the line that self-esteem is the reputation we acquire with ourselves.