of abstract: Book-marking the self: the rituals of buying and reading self-help (original) (raw)
Related papers
Taking one's responsibilities while facing adversity: a balanced analysis of self-help books reading
Sociological Research Online, 2018
Self-help books are frequently criticised by social scientists, who often impute problematic effects (on individuals and on society) to their reading. This article intends to show why this phenomenon needs to be studied through a theory of practice which includes the reception process. Drawing upon 55 interviews and 297 letters from self-help book readers, the article questions the practice of self-help reading in its own relevance system to show how readers use these books with a need for effectiveness and conduct different inquiries about their credibility. I finally argue that this empirical stage not only does not impair a critical perspective on self-help books but might actually improve it.
The rise of psy discourse has been the subject of considerable academic attention, but one of its most popular and visible forms, the self-help book, has received comparatively little attention. This article provides a Foucauldian analysis of a selection of relationship manuals; it examines the ways in which they set up a relation of the reader’s self to itself, and it explores the ethical valorizations and teleologies therein. The emphasis on the relationship with the self, and the development of mastery over the emotions advocated in the books, is related to the values held in liberal democratic societies.
Self & Society, 2015
In response to a recent BBC Radio 4 Thinking Allowed programme by sociologist Laurie Taylor which cast a critical eye on self-help books, this article offers an argument in support of self-help books at their best. Self-help books offer understanding, empathy, encouragement, tools to understand and manage life, and a sense of participation in a network of people in a similar situation. Further, there is a democratization of knowledge such that the psychotherapeutic, psychiatric and medical establishments are sharing wisdom and tools that can be used by individuals, or in peer learning. The effectiveness of integrating professional with self-help is discussed. This is a ‘both/and’ perspective of encouraging people to be aware of the social context that informs their life, but also supporting them in managing and transforming their own attitudes and choices, so that they can chart a course, including a social contribution, that is effective, peaceful and creative.
Unravelling the ‘Help’ in Self-Help
Mind and Society
The present article intends to explore the challenges faced by the urban professionals in reaching for the emotional and professional amidst the neoliberal marketplace, via the narratives salient in Self-Help texts. Self-Help texts embody metaphors that rely on agency bound “bootstrapping” narratives, where individuals are compelled to maximise their agency in terms of tangible profits and fulfil their calculated potential in the social marketplace of competition. The neoliberal marketplace obfuscates the existing inequalities through narratives of multiculturalism and individual empowerment. Deliberation through thematic analysis, this article intends to look into the emergence of the ‘achievable self’ through the prevalence of Self Help texts as a popular genre in the Indian scenario. It also seeks to discuss the mental health challenges faced by individuals in meeting the achievement benchmarks of the current ethos, and how Self-Help texts posit themselves as providing the means ...
Self-Help: The Oxymoron of Our Age Introduction
Nothing is unclear to the understanding; it is only when we fail to understand that things appear unintelligible and confused. 1 Carl Jung might have formulated this aphorism with regard to psychic illness and the dangers of naïve interpretation but it applies equally well to complicated and potentially fatal physical illnesses which defy attempts at establishing direct causation. Carl Jung's Modern Man In Search Of A Soul provides a highly insightful look at the lack of a sense of meaning in life which he claims is the crisis that guarantees all the other social crises that man faced in the 20 th century and which have shown no signs of abatement in the 21 st . Taking Modern Man as the starting point, this essay will seek to establish the link between the crisis of meaning in life that Jung elucidated and the need of people suffering from illness to find meaning and purpose behind their illness because, ultimately, regaining health is not the only concern of the ill. As Bernie Siegel very succinctly phrases it in his best-selling book, Love, Medicine and Miracles: 'Getting well is not the only goal. Even more important is learning to live without fear, to be at peace with life, and ultimately death.' 2 This essay aims to evaluate the insistently optimistic attitude towards life-threatening illnesses such as cancer that is espoused by the growing body of literature on self-help and alternative, holistic therapies and the relationship between the self and the illness that these self-help books help cultivate. A term such as self-help is ambiguous and has been used in a variety of contexts; for the purposes of this essay self-help will refer to the healthy-minded outlook and insistent optimism towards serious and often incurable illnesses that is popularised by authors such as Bernie Siegel and Norman Cousins. These eulogise a program of self-healing; the aim of these guides is to release our 'vis medicatrix naturae' 3 or the healing power that we contain within ourselves as Norman Cousins described in his pathography, Anatomy of an Illness, one
Revisioning the Self: A Phenomenological Investigation Into Self-Help Reading
The Journal of Humanistic Counseling, Education and Development, 2010
The helpfulness of self-help reading was explored through interviews with 6 female self-help readers. Themes derived through phenomenological data analysis suggested that there is a distinct structure to the self-help reading experience, including self-help reading as a medium for revisioning of self. Implications for counseling practice and research are provided.
Skilling communication: The discourse and metadiscourse of communication in self-help books
The Communication Review, 2023
In the past few decades, self-help books on communication have ranked among the top titles on bestseller lists. Offering advice about improving communication skills in a variety of contexts, they both reflect and promote a widespread discourse about the importance of good communication in everyday life, in what is in fact a paradoxical endeavor-solving flawed communication with more communication. Based on an analysis of 18 bestselling self-help books, the paper examines the meaning of three recurring themes-"listening," "awareness" and "practice"-and analyzes the paradoxical relationship between what the books say about communication and how they say it. The findings serve to illuminate the relationship between communication and metacommunication more broadly, which, in turn, helps to explain the conditions by which authors express their ideas-their selection of textuality, despite, and precisely because of, its difference from oral talk.
Social Pathologies of Contemporary Civilization, 2017
Drawing on a corpus of 80 advice books for success in the workplace and romantic partnerships, my contribution would ask the question if or in what ways the self-help discourse contributes to social pathologies, particularly concerning our (public) economic life and (private) intimate relationships. So far, advice literature for these realms has been chastised – mostly by Foucauldian commentators – for using the language of psychotherapy and (thus) informally promoting a neoliberal agenda that privatizes social problems. Self-help literature puts all the emphasis on individual suffering, frames it as the need for personal transformation/optimization and thus begs the question of social suffering and the need for collective action. However, virtually all clinical studies on bibliotherapy suggest that advice literature does in fact ease individual suffering and helps overcome personal problems. Additionally, qualitative reception studies show that advice literature is used in diverse ways and does, surprisingly enough, allow for solidarity to emerge by sharing books in smaller social circles and making people feel less alone with their troubles. I want to ask the question: How can we, as critical social scientists, make sense of this ambivalent diagnosis? Although my talk will not be able to give a definitive solution to this puzzle, one answer may lie in the type of knowledge self-help books provide and the symbolic tools they employ to persuade ourselves and others: vivid metaphors, palpable narratives, and concrete “social tropes” (recipes for action) that can be grasped easily, require not much commitment, and promise almost immediate change in emotionally charged and personally challenging situations. Having examined some of these devices, my conclusion will come back to the question of social pathologies by asking what kind of agency self-help books grant and whether this practical genre may have any chance to foster a more political type of social consciousness.
The Anxious Self in Contemporary Self-Help Literature
2014
In this paper I conduct an ‘emotional discourse analysis’ of some of the ways in which contemporary self-help books that deal with anxiety disorders textually position their readers in specific fear orientations that constitute socially patterned forms of emotional incapacity. In turn, these fear orientations structure desire orientations that constitute socially patterned forms of emotional capacity. The consumption of these books is understood as a moral action of social conformity (i.e. an attempt at meeting social expectations through emotionally reflexive means) that serves as middle class ‘equipment for living’ and that functions as a ‘danger ritual’ that organizes and sustains a particular social economy of fear and desire. The particular social anxieties that are embodied through the popular consumption of these books’ discourses help give form to middle class fears and desires, the signs that trigger their experience, and the specific means through which to move from the experience of fear-driven moral danger into the experience of desire-driven moral security. Keywords: Fear, desire, anxiety, emotional norms, embodied in/capacity theory, moral selfhood, self-help literature, middle-class subjectivity, emotion management, emotional discourse analysis.
The gendered nature of self-help
Self-help promises the chance of being 'better'. Across multifarious platforms, including books, apps and television shows, it offers hope that we can be our own agents of change for a happier life. Critical research troubles this premise, arguing that the recurring trope of the individualistic ideal-self found in self-help literature is at the expense of seeking solutions in collective, feminist, or otherwise politicised activism. Self-help is also problematically gendered, since women are often positioned as particularly in need of improvement, an understanding further intensified by postfeminist sensibility. These issues are examined conceptually before introducing ten articles on self-help published in The gendered nature of self-help 2 Feminism & Psychology across three decades and brought together as a Virtual Special Issue to offer a significant body of work for scholars and students alike.