confidence that someone else places in us, we rediscover ‘our own’ confidence. Confidence is a gift that others give us, and one that we willingly accept. When my students ask me a difficult question, I offer them a similar gift in return: I tell them that they know the answer. I show that I have confidence in them, and that is usually enough to make them come back quickly with an interesting response.
We sometimes hear that a co-worker, a family member, or someone in the neighborhood lacks self-confidence, as though this confidence were purely an internal matter, something that they had failed to generate on their own. But if no one has ever taken the trouble to give them confidence or placed trust in them, it’s not surprising that they suffer from anxiety. People are puzzled that these acquaintances of theirs lack self-assurance, given their abilities. But this is to forget that we are creatures that exist within relationships, not isolated skill-accumulating monads, and that our confidence grows out of the kinds of bonds we have developed with others.
This truth about relational confidence helps us to better understand the suffering of certain oppressed minorities. Often, the best way to oppress them has been to destroy the bonds between individuals by every means possible, and even to remove the possibility of forming interpersonal solidarity. The accounts of former black slaves, and survivors of the Nazi camps, illustrate this unequivocally: nothing is more effective in breaking men than breaking the bonds between them, separating families, pitting one against another, and creating a climate of pervasive distrust and denunciation.
In his powerful book The Fire Next Time, published in 1963, African-American writer James Baldwin exposes this implacable mechanism of oppression and at the same time confirms that the only way to resist it and maintain one’s confidence is to know the value of one’s ties to others, to find in them the strength to fight: ‘Yes, it does indeed mean something – something unspeakable – to be born, in a white country, […] black. You very soon, without knowing it, give up all hope of communion. Black people, mainly, look down or look up but do not look at each other, not at you, and white people, mainly, look away. And the universe is simply a sounding drum; there is no way, no way whatever, so it seemed then and has sometimes seemed since, to get through a life, to love your wife and children, or your friends, or your mother and father, or to be loved. The universe, which is not merely the stars and the moon and the planets, flowers, grass, and trees, but other people, has […] made no room for you, and if love will not swing wide the gates, no other power will or can.’
The psychoanalyst and writer Anne Dufourmantelle, author of Power of Gentleness and L’Éloge du risque (In Praise of Risk), who died tragically in 2017 while rescuing two children from drowning, made the radical statement that ‘there’s no such thing as a lack of self-confidence’. Listening to the patients on her couch as they tried to find words for their pain, she understood that their anxiety was primarily a lack of confidence in others, the disastrous consequence of a childhood cut off from the precious sense of inner security. The survivors of these unhappy childhoods were so deprived of security and of people who placed trust in them that they were unable to have confidence in themselves. When Anne Dufourmantelle says that ‘there’s no such thing as a lack of self-confidence’, she means that her patients’ anxiety derives from a lack of confidence in others. Self-confidence and a confidence in one’s relationships therefore refer to one and the same thing.
This is similarly illustrated by paranoiacs: they have no confidence in themselves, nor do they have confidence in others. Being suspicious of everything that comes from the people around them, from the media, from the world in general, they suffer from ‘inner insecurity’. Consumed by their general mistrust, they can find no basis for having confidence in themselves.
There is consequently one action that will help us to develop confidence in ourselves and at the same time have confidence in others: let us venture out, let us establish relations with different and inspiring people, let us choose teachers and friends who help us grow, who awaken us and reveal us to ourselves. Let us look for relationships that are good for us, that increase our sense of security and thereby free us. And let’s remember the little two-year-old: he walks up to the guest who has just entered his house. He advances toward the unknown. He is afraid, obviously. A stranger has just appeared in his house. But he approaches him anyway. He walks forward with his fear. He has confidence in himself, just as he has confidence in the stranger and in the familiar faces around him. This confidence is not genetically or biologically determined. It is developed, little by little, in the intertwining bonds that have enveloped him since birth and reassured him, just like the towels we wrap around infants when they come out of the bath. We sometimes give their little bodies an energetic rub, as if to remind them that we are there, that we are taking care of them, that they are not alone. These attentions give them confidence. This, more than anything, is what they need. Later, when we encourage them to eat by themselves or take their first steps, we will show that we trust them. No one can develop self-confidence all on his or her own. Self-confidence is first and foremost about love and friendship.
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