The textbook covers the laws of the emergence, development and functioning of a person's ideas about the importance of his personality and activity among other people, his own qualities and feelings, advantages and disadvantages. The author describes the phenomenology of self-esteem, approaches to it, its content, talks about its motives, mechanisms, methods of protection, classifies the varieties of self-esteem, reveals the essence of sources, age dynamics, ways of developing self-esteem. Separate chapters are devoted to empirical research and methods for studying self-esteem.