The Importance of Self-Compassion in Terms of Self Psychology

Abstract

Self-compassion has fostered a new way to build connectedness with oneself and affirmed the importance of offering compassion to oneself. However, there have been numerous arguments about the similarity with other self-related concepts, yet they have neglected its importance in self-psychology. For instance, self-compassion could be seen as an important element in Kohut’s concept of self in illustrating the self-object and self-experience theory, thus leading to a healthy self. Additionally, the self-schemas (self-esteem and self-efficacy) have been sufficiently shown to be associating with and predicting positive psychological outcomes and have further demonstrated the positive relations with self-compassion. Self-compassion thus demonstrated that similar features have been shared among the self-schemas. Moreover, with the claim that self-compassion was more precise than self-esteem, self-compassion should be emphasized by self-psychology then to develop a new era of “true self-esteem”.

Keywords

• self-compassion
• self-psychology
• self-schema
• self-esteem