When Did "Sel Esteem" Enter The Psychologist's Lexicon?

[ralph124c]

“Self Esteem” seems to be a big issue today-the lack of it is said to account for a lot of unhappiness, and even criminal behavior has been ascribed to a lack of it.
My question: when did the term come into common use?

[Ludovic]

I can’t say I’ve ever heard the term.

[Hail_Ants]

@Ludovic

I can’t say I’ve ever heard the term.

You’re gonna want a mod to fix your thread title!

My guess would be definitely post-WWII psychology, likely the late 60s and later when it started to enter the mainstream lexicon. As so often is the case with pop culture’s view of new sciences first it was heralded as an amazing breakthrough and the be-all end-all to raising good kids (the 1970s), then there was a (deserved) backlash against this overbearing, overly simplistic idea (the 1980s), then a backlash against the backlash (the 90s), and finally today I feel it has matured into a reasonable state of understanding. Yes it’s very important, but it’s also very complicated.

[Exapno_Mapcase]

Close. You’re only off by a century.

Psychologist William James coined it in 1892. A page on the history of self-esteem.

JOHN DEWEY and William James were among the early psychologist proponents of the importance of the self. Dewey discussed “intuition of self” in his seminal 1886 work, Psychology, using knowledge of self as the talisman for knowledge gains in general. Selfhood was, in this view, essential to freedom. But it was James who, in 1892, first used the term self-esteem with an explicit scientific definition. A key task in socializing children, in James’s view, involved helping them gain the capacity to develop “self” and, with it, the capacity to adapt to different social settings with appropriate projections of self. Self-esteem, more specifically, involved the kind of perceptions that, properly honed, were crucial to achievement and success.

[Dewey_Finn]

I did a search on “self esteem” in Google Books and found references as early as 1830. Of course almost all of those references were in books about phrenology.

[gigi]

I do love salt but I’ve never referred to it this way.