Abstract
Despite the fact that the self-esteem has been one of the most important concepts in psychology, little attention has been paid to the sources or functions of the self-esteem itself and the self-esteem motive. The purpose of the present study is to dig out the implicit assumptions of the self-esteem which have been taken by many researchers so far, pointing that “the self”in traditional framework had been too isolated from social contexts and human relationships in the real world. Then, new approaches that are mainly based on ecological and interpersonal perspectives were introduced. In the last part of this paper, the implications of these approaches to the self-esteem and future researches are discussed.
