The Collaborative International Dictionary
Self-assertion \Self`-as*ser"tion\, n. The act of asserting one's self, or one's own rights or claims; the quality of being self-asserting.
Wiktionary
n. The aggressive advancement of one's own opinions or wishes.
WordNet
n. the act of putting forth your own opinions in a boastful or inconsiderate manner that implies you feel superior to others
the act of asserting yourself in an aggressive manner
Usage examples of "self-assertion".
Though with a glittering eye and a strong flush on his cheek, he conserved a deliberate incidental manner, and maintained a pose of extreme interest in his own prelection as, seated in an arm-chair before the fire he began to talk with a very definite intention of a quiet self-assertion, of absorbing and controlling the conversation.
There was a grand assurance in the rigidity of its uprightness, a calm self-assertion in its uncompromising straightness, as if, poised upon circumvagant roots, that, in exploring the quartzy soil, had curled themselves around a layer of primeval granite, it knew that nothing short of an earthquake which should have power to upheave the foundations of the hill itself could compel its stately body to the performance of any undue genuflexions.
The self-assertion of the recusants has found eulogists in plenty, but who has celebrated the self-denial that was thrown away on this other task, which is farther from fulfilment now than it was when the scholars of the Renaissance gave up their patriotism and the tongue of their childhood in the name of fellow-citizenship with the ancients and the oecumenical authority of letters?
When thrown on their own resources, they are so demoralised by ages of dependence on the brain, that they die after a few efforts at self-assertion, from sheer unfamiliarity with the position, and inability to recognise themselves when disjointed rudely from their habitual associations.
A passionate desire of self-assertion familiarised her with projects, with ideas, which formerly she had glanced at only to dismiss as ignoble.
However, the self-assertion of the individual or of groups of individuals, their struggles for superiority, and the conflicts which resulted therefrom, have already been analyzed, described, and glorified from time immemorial.
Conspicuous self-assertion gave way to a more relaxed assurance, and she adopted the air of casually authoritative kindness to which most underlings responded so well.
Yet even in this case its self-assertion bears witness to its dissatisfaction with itself, since it cannot fulfil its function until completed by its counterpart in another organism.
Some twenty miles earlier I had happened to tell her that the day school she would attend at Beardsley was a rather high-class, non-coeducational one, with no modern nonsense, whereupon Lo treated me to one of those furious harangues of hers where entreaty and insult, self-assertion and double talk, vicious vulgarity and childish despair, were interwoven in an exasperating semblance of logic which prompted a semblance of explanation from me.
She closed her eyes for some moments, as if gathering strength to proceed with her remarkable, nonplussing self-assertion.
In place of the conflict between erotic strivings adverse to the ego and the self-assertion, we are given the conflict between the "life-task" and the "psychic-laziness.