Does Superman Suffer From Low Self-Esteem?

If you’ve been following “Smallville: Superman: The Early Years”, then no doubt you will know that Clarke Kent, aka young Superman has been having trouble flying because he’s frightened of heights!

Does Superman have low self-esteem? If he does, then how does he know? More importantly, how does he maintain that self image of himself?

We all have images of ourselves, we may see ourselves for example as highly confident or painfully shy.
What I am trying to get at here is, how do we know and how do we maintain that self-image of ourselves? We humans have five physical senses that we use to orientate in the physical world. Everything we do in the world is encoded using these five senses. Our memories are also encoded using these five senses, they have to be, there’s nothing else.

Here’s what I’m getting at, do we literally have an internal (subconscious) self-image of ourselves? We may not be aware of this image consciously, but it influences our daily behaviour.

The most exciting aspect of this is, can that image be changed and hence our behaviour will automatically change. This image is formed with our interaction with the world and with others and continues to change. We are usually not aware of that image. Sometimes that image may be stuck?

Case Example.

A client comes and says they are stuck. After some work, the clients internal self-image is found to be a Black Panther in an iron cage. When that image is changed and the Black Panther is now in the forest, free to roam, to climb trees, feel the ground underneath it, the sun against its face and smell the air.The client reports that for some reason they no longer feel stuck….

Superman grows up to be able to fly faster than a speeding bullet and his internal image is that of a man of steel.

Flickr Creative Commons image by Xurble