Self-esteem comes in two varieties: self-satisfaction and dissatisfaction with oneself. Self-love can be assigned to the third section, to the section of actions, because here for the most part they include a certain group of actions rather than feelings in the narrow sense of the word. For both kinds of self-esteem, the language has a sufficient supply of synonyms. Such, on the one hand, are pride, self-satisfaction, arrogance, vanity, self-reverence, arrogance, vanity; on the other, modesty, humiliation, embarrassment, uncertainty, shame, humiliation, repentance, consciousness of one’s own shame and despair. These two opposite classes of feelings are immediate, primary gifts of our nature. Representatives of associationism, perhaps, will say that these are secondary, derivative phenomena, arising from the rapid summation of feelings of pleasure and displeasure, to which mental states favorable or unfavorable for us lead, and the sum of pleasant ideas gives complacency, and the sum of unpleasant ones — the opposite feeling of shame. No doubt, when we feel content with ourselves, we willingly go over in our minds all possible rewards for our merits, and, despairing of ourselves, we foresee misfortune; but the simple expectation of a reward is not self-satisfaction, and the foreseeing of misfortune is not despair, for each of us still has some constant average tone of well-being, completely independent of our objective reasons for being pleased or dissatisfied. Thus, a person placed in very unfavorable conditions of life can remain in imperturbable self-satisfaction, and a person who commands universal respect and whose success in life is assured can be completely distrustful of his own strength.
However, it can be said that the normal stimulus of well-being for a person is his favorable or unfavorable position in the world — his success or failure. A person whose empirical personality has wide limits, who has always achieved success with the help of his own strength, a person with a high position in society, financially secure, surrounded by friends, enjoying fame, will hardly be inclined to succumb to terrible doubts, will hardly treat his forces with the distrust with which she treated them in her youth. (“Did I not grow the gardens of great Babylon?”) Meanwhile, a person who has suffered several failures one after another, loses heart halfway through life, is imbued with painful self-doubt and retreats before attempts that do not at all exceed his strength.
Feelings of complacency and humiliation are of the same kind — they can be considered primary types of emotions along with, for example, anger and pain. Each of them has a unique effect on our physiognomy. With complacency, the extensor muscles are innervated, the eyes take on a confident and triumphant expression, the gait becomes vigorous and somewhat swaying, the nostrils widen and a peculiar smile plays on the lips.
The whole set of external bodily expressions of self-satisfaction is observed in the most extreme manifestation in insane asylums, where one can always find people who are literally obsessed with their own greatness; their self-satisfied appearance and swaggering gait are a sad contrast with the complete absence of any personal human dignity. In these same «castles of despair» we can meet a vivid example of the opposite type — a good-natured man who imagines that he has committed a mortal sin and forever ruined his soul. This is a type of humiliated reptile, evading extraneous observations, not daring to speak loudly with us and look us straight in the eye. Opposite feelings like fear and anger under similar pathological conditions can arise without any external cause. We know from daily experience how much the barometer of our self-esteem and self-confidence rises and falls according to purely organic rather than rational causes, and these changes in our subjective testimony do not correspond at all with changes in the assessment of our personality by friends.