Full Text

 

Self-love is a controversial construct: Throughout history, views on self-love have been polarized as “good” (associated with well-being and health) versus “bad” (associated with narcissism and selfishness). Although predominately equated in academic literature, self-love and narcissism are in fact opposites. However, there is a lack of adequate research, debate, and empirical work on the construct of self-love and its contributing factors. We attempted to address the limitations of previous studies and aim to propose a methodologically sound model of self-love. Arguing that psychotherapists benefit from a broad and differentiated understanding of self-love, we administered 13 semistructured interviews with regular psychotherapists, psychotherapist authors of books or journal articles on self-love, and psychotherapists/coaches with long experience in group work on self-love. Interview questions focused on specifying self-love and its components. An inductive thematic analysis yielded a preliminary model with three main themes: (a) self-contact, defined as giving attention to oneself; (b) self-acceptance, defined as being at peace with oneself; and (c) self-care, defined as being protective of and caring for oneself. We first validated the findings with the same sample of experts and then assessed our preliminary model’s consistency with the existing literature and its comprehensiveness, before augmenting and modifying the model to arrive at a final model of self-love. The relationships with other self-related constructs such as self-compassion and self-esteem...