IN RECENT years, the fields of psychiatry, psychology, and sociology have all experienced an upsurge of interest in the nature of the self-image. The fact that these three fields, differing as they do in their subject matter, research methods, perspectives, and foci of interest, should come to share an interest in this aspect of personality bespeaks, perhaps, the power of this concept to intrude itself upon established ways of thought and procedure. Though each field bears with it the inertia of its distinctive tradition, all have found that the idea of the self-image is, if not central to their concerns, at least relevant to them. The self-image is, of course, a complex concept. In this paper, we will consider one aspect of this concept, viz., the individual’s self-esteem, the degree to which he holds attitudes of acceptance or rejection toward himself. It is one of the peculiarities of the self, as MEAD(~) has noted, that the self is reflexive, that the self is both subject and object, that the judge and the object to be judged are encased within the same skin. Every individual has attitudes towards a multitude of objects in the world, and one of these objects probably the most important is himself. It is this favorable or unfavorable attitude toward oneself that we designate by the term self-esteem. There is ample clinical and theoretical warrant for expecting the individual’s level of selfacceptance to have certain emotional consequences. Some clinicians go so far as to characterize low self-esteem as one of the basic elements of neurosis. HORNEY@) and FROMM@) stress that an underlying feeling of worthlessness is characteristic of the sick personality. A psychotherapist, ANGY,IL@) states: “In the neurotic development there are always a number of unfortunate circumstances which instill in the child a self-derogatory feeling. This involves on the one hand a feeling of weakness which discourages him from the free expression of his wish for mastery, and on the other a feeling that there is something fundamentally wrong with him and that, therefore, he cannot be loved. The whole complicated structure of neurosis appears to be founded on this secret feeling of worthlessness, that is, on the belief that one is inadequate to master the situations that confront him and that he is undeserving of love . . .“. One reason that low self-esteem may be related to certain symptoms of emotional disturbance is that, in MURPHY’S(~) view, the self-image is central to the individual’s value system. “Whatever the self is,” he says, “it becomes a center, an anchorage point, a standard of comparison, an ultimate real. Inevitably, it takes its place as a supreme value . . . . To most