Nathaniel Branden

Nathaniel Branden, born Nathan Blumenthal in Brampton, Ontario, in 1930 and died in Los Angeles in 2014, was a psychotherapist and author of self-help books. His name is tied to the psychology of self-esteem and to the promotion of Ayn Rand's Objectivism, with which he was closely involved both intellectually and personally for almost two decades.

He studied psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles. In the late 1950s he founded the Nathaniel Branden Institute, which took Rand's philosophy to lectures and seminars across the United States. In 1968 his break with Rand was abrupt, and he was pushed out of the official Objectivist movement. From then on he concentrated on his own work, including The Psychology of Self-Esteem and The Art of Living Consciously.

His best-known contribution is the idea that self-esteem is a basic psychological need, and that when it goes unmet, anxiety, depression and relationship difficulties tend to follow. He proposed six internal practices, or pillars, that sustain it: living consciously, self-acceptance, self-responsibility, self-assertiveness, living purposefully and personal integrity. As a therapist he also developed the sentence completion method. His influence lives on in popular writing on self-esteem, although he distanced himself from the so-called self-esteem movement.