Sin, Pride, and Self-Acceptance (Part 2)

So I finished up Sin, Pride, and Self-Acceptance from Friday's post over the weekend. Really, really good. Here's how he brings together the two sides of our problem of pride v. self-acceptance.

Drawing heavily on the work of early 20th century psychologist Karen Horney, Cooper proposes that pride and issues of self-hatred are really one in the same. This might sound a little psycho-speak, but stick with it and see if it makes sense.

The "self" pretty early on has a great deal of anxiety: whether that be inter-personal (i.e. with family members, peers, other relationships) or intra-personal (i.e. the basic reality that we are human, don't always do what we should, that we sometimes just don't like ourselves, the realization of death and the reality that our life is made or broken by our decisions).

Interpersonally, we try to find ways to reduce that anxiety. Horney identifies three ways: moving against others (the self-expansive, traditional pride solution), moving towards others (the self-effacing, co-dependent solution), and the moving away from others (the self-resignation, retreat solution).

The important things about all three of these movements is that they each block the possibility of genuine relationship with another. The other important thing in all three is that are each egocentric, that is, "always egocentric in the sense of being wrapped up in himself."

Intrapersonally (within our own understanding of ourselves), we also have anxiety. The way that we cope with that is by creating in our imaginations our "idealized selves." The idealized self is an image of ourselves whereby we take all of our own understandings of our best qualities of ourselves and blow those up exponentially. It's us, super-human, performing perfectly. Here's how Horney explains this:

"A person builds up an idealized image of himself because he cannot tolerate himself as he actually is. The image counteracts this calamity; but having placed himself on a pedestal, he can tolerate his real self still less and starts to rage against it, to despise himself and chafe under the yoke of his own unattainable demands upon himself. He wavers then between self-adoration and self-contempt, between his idealized imgae and his despised image, with no solid middle ground to fall on."