Revisioning the Self: A Phenomenological Investigation Into Self-Help Reading (original) (raw)
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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.
of abstract: Book-marking the self: the rituals of buying and reading self-help
Women's Studies in Communication
Many commentators have argued that contemporary society has become increasing reflexive and with this a return in interest with the self-as both an ontological property that can be 'rediscovered' by the atomised social actor, and as an existential project or lifestyle complete with a set of 'life skills ' (e.g. Foucault, 1988, Giddens, 1991. This objectification of the 'self' in late modernity has taken many forms but this paper would like to address the increasing psychological nature of the self as a prescriptive discourse through the global cultural industry of self-help books. Self-help and self-awareness books have had a consistently high rating in the American bestseller lists over the past thirty years with domestic sales reaching $9.6 billion in 2006. This strong consumptive relationship with self-help books is not an exclusively American phenomenon but can also be found to be on the increase in Britain, Japan, China, and India to name a few. Despite the huge popularity of self-help books, the practice of buying and reading self-help books and the many anecdotal claims made by their readers that these books have 'changed' their lives the phenomenon of self-help has received very little scholarly attention. In this paper I would like to redress this academic blind spot and investigate the impact that self-help books and their message of self-knowledge and self-awareness have on their atomised reader. A discursive analysis of self-help books will be undertaken with the purpose of exposing the ideological claims of self-help books. This alternative interpretative framework will be tested against the views and responses of regular self-help readers. By combining these two methods it is hoped to expose the nature of self-help books and locate the place that the search for self-knowledge and self-care have acquired in contemporary society.
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.
She reads, he reads: gender differences and learning through self-help books
European Journal For Research on the Education and Learning of Adults, 2015
Despite considerable scholarly attention given to self-help literature, there has been a lack of research about the experience of self-help reading. In this article, we explore gender differences in self-help reading. We argue that men and women read self-help books for different reasons and with different levels of engagement, and that they experience different outcomes from reading. We provide evidence from in-depth interviews with 89 women and 45 men. Women are more likely to seek out books of their own volition, to engage in learning strategies beyond reading, and to take action as a result of reading. Men are more likely to read books relating to careers, while women are more likely to read books about interpersonal relationships. We argue that these gender differences reflect profound political-economic and cultural changes, and that such changes also help explain the gendered evolution of adult, continuing, and higher education in recent decades.
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.
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.
Memory for Information in Self-Help Psychology Books
Psychological Reports, 1989
Research on psychological self-help books has not demonstrated conclusively that improvements in mental health occur after people read the books. This study examined a more sensitive measure of change: how much information is retained when people read a self-help book. 107 men completed the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire in Session 1, read a self-help book during a 2-wk. interval, and completed an immediate or delayed 50-item true-false memory test in Session 2. The dependent measure was the score on the memory test. Regression analysis indicated that retention interval, personality scores, interest, and impact measures were significant predictors of memory scores. Memory for self-help information could be an important predictor of self-directed psychological change.
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 ...
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-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