Self-help book
Encyclopedia
Self-help books are books written with the stated intention to instruct any readers on a number of personal problems. They take their name from Self-Help
, the Victorian best-seller, but are also known and classified under "self-improvement", a term that is a modernized version of self-help. They moved from a niche position to being a postmodern cultural phenomenon in the late twentieth century - a period marked out by 'the burgeoning literature of self-improvement...that expanded dramatically in the last quarter of the twentieth century, particularly in its final decade'.
In Western culture, a line of descent may be traced back from Samuel Smiles' Self-Help to when 'the Renaissance concern with self-fashioning produced a flood of educational and self-help materials': thus 'the Florentine Giovanni della Casa
in his book of manners published in 1558 suggests: "It is also an unpleasant habit to lift another person's wine or his food to your nose and smell it"'. The Middle Ages saw the genre personified in ' Conduir-amour ("guide in love matters")'; while in classical Rome Cicero
's "On Friendship" and "On Duties" became 'handbooks and guides...through the centuries' - not to mention Ovid
's "Art of Love" and "Remedy of Love". The former has been described as 'the best sex book, as valid for San Francisco and London as for ancient Rome', dealing as it does 'with practical problems of everyday life: where to go to meet girls, how to start a conversation with them, how to keep them interested, and...how to be sociable rather than athletic in bed'; the latter, equally essential, contains 'a series of instructions, as frank as they are ingenious and brilliantly expressed, on falling out of love'.
For better or worse, it is clear that self-help books have had 'a very important role in developing social concepts of disease in the twentieth century', and that they 'disseminate these concepts through the general public so that ordinary people acquire a language for describing some of the complex and ineffable features of emotional and behavioral life'.
Where traditional psychology and psychotherapy will tend to be written in an impersonal, objective mode, many self-help books 'involve a first-person involvement and often a conversion experience': in keeping with the self-help support groups
on which they often draw, horizontal peer-support and validation is thus offered the reader, as well as advice "from above".
Yet arguably with the movement from the self-help group to the individual "self-improvement" reader something of that peer support has been lost, reflecting the broader way that 'over the course of the last three decades of the twentieth-century, there has been a significant shift in the meaning of "self-help"'. A collective enterprise has become a refashioning of the individual self: 'in less than thirty years, "self-help" - once synonymous with mutual aid - has come to be understood...as a largely individual undertaking'.
The other result of the loss of 'Weber
's "traditional behavior...everyday action to which people have become habitually accustomed"' is an increased social pressure for Self-fashioning
: 'while one's identity might have been formerly anchored in (and limited by) a community...the self-creating self must create a written narrative of his or her life'. self-help books 'written and read for the purpose of helping people build a personal philosophy' contribute to that end.
The danger may arise however of an overestimation of the possibilities of change, given that 'we do not in any meaningful sense intend or choose our birth, our parents, our bodies, our language, our culture, our thoughts, our dreams, our desires, our death, and so on'. The 'Twelve-step "Traditions"
...have fostered a notion of individual self-mastery or self-control as limited...use of the Serenity Prayer
encourages individuals to accept what they cannot change, to find courage to change what they can change, and to seek wisdom in discerning the difference'. Self-help books will indeed often acknowledge formally that 'this book does not replace the need for therapy and counselling for troubled relationships or survivors of a Dysfunctional family
'. In practice however, fuelled by competitive advertising, often 'such books hold out to the reader the promise of a virtually "instantaneous" transformation'; and there ensues something of a 'built-in contradiction of the celebratory arc of the self-help book combined with the stubborn realities' of the human world.
The reader may go away disillusioned; or may seek for the answer in the next book, so that 'self-help books can become an addiction in and of themselves' - a process that will 'have fostered the belabored self' rather than relieving it. In that perspective, since all self-help books 'have at least one common message. They tell you that you have the power to change yourself....By implication all of these books are saying, if you are in pain, if you are stuck and can't seem to change, it's no one's fault but your own'.
such as romantic relationships, or aspects of the mind and human behavior
which believers in self-help feel can be controlled with effort.
Self-help books typically advertise themselves as being able to increase self-awareness and performance, including satisfaction with one's life. They often say that they can help you achieve this more quickly than with conventional therapies.
Many celebrities have marketed self help books including Jennifer Love Hewitt
, Oprah Winfrey, Elizabeth Taylor, Charlie Fitzmaurice, and Cher
.
Like most books, self-help books can be purchased both offline and online; 'between 1972 and 2000, the numbers of self-help books...increased from 1.1 percent to 2.4 percent of the total number of books in print'.
's "Upmanship" books are satirical takes on status-seeking under the cloak of sociableness - 'remember, that it is just on such occasions that an appearance of geniality is most important' - cast in advice-book form. A few decades later, with the neoliberal turn, such advice - 'Remember the reality of self-interest' - would be being seriously advocated in the self-help world: in bestsellers like Swim with the Sharks
, all 'kinds of seemingly benign guile are encouraged', on the principle that 'status displays matter: just don't be suckered by them yourself'.
Perhaps the best-known fictional embodiment of the world of the self-help book is Bridget Jones
. Taking 'self-help books...[as] a new form of religion' - 'a kind of secularised religion - a sort of moral values lite' - she struggles to integrate its often conflicting instructions into a coherent whole. 'She must stop beating herself over the head with Women Who Love Too Much
and instead think more towards Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus
...see Richard's behaviour less as a sign that she is co-dependent and loving too much and more in the light of him being like a Martian rubber band'. Even she, however, has the occasional crisis of faith, when she wonders: 'Maybe it helps if you've never read a self-help book in your life'.
In the BookWorld
Companion, it is suggested that 'those of you who have tired of the glitzy world of shopping and inappropriate boyfriends in Chicklit, a trip to Dubious Lifestyle Advice might be the next step. An hour in the hallowed halls of invented ills will leave you with at least ten problems you never knew you had, let alone existed'.
Self-Help (book)
Self-Help; with Illustrations of Character and Conduct was a book published in 1859 by Samuel Smiles. The second edition of 1866 added Perseverance to the subtitle. It has been called "the bible of mid-Victorian liberalism"....
, the Victorian best-seller, but are also known and classified under "self-improvement", a term that is a modernized version of self-help. They moved from a niche position to being a postmodern cultural phenomenon in the late twentieth century - a period marked out by 'the burgeoning literature of self-improvement...that expanded dramatically in the last quarter of the twentieth century, particularly in its final decade'.
Early history
Informal guides to everyday behaviour might be said to have existed almost as long as writing itself. Certainly ancient Egyptian "Codes" of conduct 'have a curiously modern note: "you trail from street to street, smelling of beer...like a broken rudder, good for nothing....you have been found performing acrobatics on a wall!"'. Indeed, 'some social observers have suggested that the Bible is really the first and most significant and most helpful of self-help books.In Western culture, a line of descent may be traced back from Samuel Smiles' Self-Help to when 'the Renaissance concern with self-fashioning produced a flood of educational and self-help materials': thus 'the Florentine Giovanni della Casa
Giovanni della Casa
Giovanni della Casa was an Italian poet and cleric.-Biography:He was born at Florence, in Tuscany. He studied at Bologna, Padua, Florence and Rome, and by his learning attracted the patronage of Alexander Farnese, who, as Pope Paul III, made him archbishop of Benevento and later nuncio to Venice,...
in his book of manners published in 1558 suggests: "It is also an unpleasant habit to lift another person's wine or his food to your nose and smell it"'. The Middle Ages saw the genre personified in ' Conduir-amour ("guide in love matters")'; while in classical Rome Cicero
Cicero
Marcus Tullius Cicero , was a Roman philosopher, statesman, lawyer, political theorist, and Roman constitutionalist. He came from a wealthy municipal family of the equestrian order, and is widely considered one of Rome's greatest orators and prose stylists.He introduced the Romans to the chief...
's "On Friendship" and "On Duties" became 'handbooks and guides...through the centuries' - not to mention Ovid
Ovid
Publius Ovidius Naso , known as Ovid in the English-speaking world, was a Roman poet who is best known as the author of the three major collections of erotic poetry: Heroides, Amores, and Ars Amatoria...
's "Art of Love" and "Remedy of Love". The former has been described as 'the best sex book, as valid for San Francisco and London as for ancient Rome', dealing as it does 'with practical problems of everyday life: where to go to meet girls, how to start a conversation with them, how to keep them interested, and...how to be sociable rather than athletic in bed'; the latter, equally essential, contains 'a series of instructions, as frank as they are ingenious and brilliantly expressed, on falling out of love'.
The postmodern phenomenon
It is however in the last half-century or so that the humble self-help book has jumped to cultural prominence, a fact admitted by both the advocates and the critics - often highly polarised - of the self-improvement genre. Some would 'view the buying of such books...as an exercise in self-education'. Others, more critical, still concede that 'it is too prevalent and powerful a phenomenon to overlook, despite belonging to "pop" culture'.For better or worse, it is clear that self-help books have had 'a very important role in developing social concepts of disease in the twentieth century', and that they 'disseminate these concepts through the general public so that ordinary people acquire a language for describing some of the complex and ineffable features of emotional and behavioral life'.
Where traditional psychology and psychotherapy will tend to be written in an impersonal, objective mode, many self-help books 'involve a first-person involvement and often a conversion experience': in keeping with the self-help support groups
Self-help groups for mental health
Self-help groups for mental health are voluntary associations of people who share a common desire to overcome mental illness or otherwise increase their level of cognitive or emotional wellbeing. There are several international mental health self-help organizations including Emotions Anonymous, the...
on which they often draw, horizontal peer-support and validation is thus offered the reader, as well as advice "from above".
Yet arguably with the movement from the self-help group to the individual "self-improvement" reader something of that peer support has been lost, reflecting the broader way that 'over the course of the last three decades of the twentieth-century, there has been a significant shift in the meaning of "self-help"'. A collective enterprise has become a refashioning of the individual self: 'in less than thirty years, "self-help" - once synonymous with mutual aid - has come to be understood...as a largely individual undertaking'.
Behind the self-help book explosion
'What social theorists call "detraditionalization" - the tendency of advancing capitalism to disrupt the cultures and traditions that may stand in the way of the accumulation of profit' has been seen as underpinning behind the self-help phenomenon in two (overlapping) ways. The first is the eclipse of the informal, communitarian transmission of folkways and folk wisdom: 'the charge that when self-help writers are being simplistic and repetitious, they are also being banal and unoriginal, merely offering their readers platitudes...on behalf of the best parts of folk wisdom', may simply be because they are providing a formal conduit for the conveyance of such "home truths" in an increasingly unstructured and anomic worldThe other result of the loss of 'Weber
Max Weber
Karl Emil Maximilian "Max" Weber was a German sociologist and political economist who profoundly influenced social theory, social research, and the discipline of sociology itself...
's "traditional behavior...everyday action to which people have become habitually accustomed"' is an increased social pressure for Self-fashioning
Self-fashioning
Self-fashioning, a term introduced by Stephen Greenblatt , is used to describe the process of constructing one's identity and public persona according to a set of socially acceptable standards...
: 'while one's identity might have been formerly anchored in (and limited by) a community...the self-creating self must create a written narrative of his or her life'. self-help books 'written and read for the purpose of helping people build a personal philosophy' contribute to that end.
The danger may arise however of an overestimation of the possibilities of change, given that 'we do not in any meaningful sense intend or choose our birth, our parents, our bodies, our language, our culture, our thoughts, our dreams, our desires, our death, and so on'. The 'Twelve-step "Traditions"
Twelve-step program
A Twelve-Step Program is a set of guiding principles outlining a course of action for recovery from addiction, compulsion, or other behavioral problems...
...have fostered a notion of individual self-mastery or self-control as limited...use of the Serenity Prayer
Serenity Prayer
The Serenity Prayer is the common name for an originally untitled prayer by the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. The prayer has been adopted by Alcoholics Anonymous and other twelve-step programs.The best-known form is:...
encourages individuals to accept what they cannot change, to find courage to change what they can change, and to seek wisdom in discerning the difference'. Self-help books will indeed often acknowledge formally that 'this book does not replace the need for therapy and counselling for troubled relationships or survivors of a Dysfunctional family
Dysfunctional family
A dysfunctional family is a family in which conflict, misbehavior, and often abuse on the part of individual members occur continually and regularly, leading other members to accommodate such actions. Children sometimes grow up in such families with the understanding that such an arrangement is...
'. In practice however, fuelled by competitive advertising, often 'such books hold out to the reader the promise of a virtually "instantaneous" transformation'; and there ensues something of a 'built-in contradiction of the celebratory arc of the self-help book combined with the stubborn realities' of the human world.
The reader may go away disillusioned; or may seek for the answer in the next book, so that 'self-help books can become an addiction in and of themselves' - a process that will 'have fostered the belabored self' rather than relieving it. In that perspective, since all self-help books 'have at least one common message. They tell you that you have the power to change yourself....By implication all of these books are saying, if you are in pain, if you are stuck and can't seem to change, it's no one's fault but your own'.
Characteristics
Self-help books often focus on popular psychologyPsychology
Psychology is the study of the mind and behavior. Its immediate goal is to understand individuals and groups by both establishing general principles and researching specific cases. For many, the ultimate goal of psychology is to benefit society...
such as romantic relationships, or aspects of the mind and human behavior
Human behavior
Human behavior refers to the range of behaviors exhibited by humans and which are influenced by culture, attitudes, emotions, values, ethics, authority, rapport, hypnosis, persuasion, coercion and/or genetics....
which believers in self-help feel can be controlled with effort.
Self-help books typically advertise themselves as being able to increase self-awareness and performance, including satisfaction with one's life. They often say that they can help you achieve this more quickly than with conventional therapies.
Many celebrities have marketed self help books including Jennifer Love Hewitt
Jennifer Love Hewitt
Jennifer Love Hewitt is an American actress, producer, television director and former singer-songwriter. Hewitt began her acting career as a child by appearing in television commercials and the Disney Channel series Kids Incorporated...
, Oprah Winfrey, Elizabeth Taylor, Charlie Fitzmaurice, and Cher
Cher
Cher is an American recording artist, television personality, actress, director, record producer and philanthropist. Referred to as the Goddess of Pop, she has won an Academy Award, a Grammy Award, an Emmy Award, three Golden Globes and a Cannes Film Festival Award among others for her work in...
.
Like most books, self-help books can be purchased both offline and online; 'between 1972 and 2000, the numbers of self-help books...increased from 1.1 percent to 2.4 percent of the total number of books in print'.
Fictional analogues
Stephen PotterStephen Potter
Stephen Meredith Potter was a British author best known for his mocking self-help books, and film and television derivatives from them....
's "Upmanship" books are satirical takes on status-seeking under the cloak of sociableness - 'remember, that it is just on such occasions that an appearance of geniality is most important' - cast in advice-book form. A few decades later, with the neoliberal turn, such advice - 'Remember the reality of self-interest' - would be being seriously advocated in the self-help world: in bestsellers like Swim with the Sharks
Harvey Mackay
Harvey Mackay is a businessman and columnist. Mackay is perhaps best known as the author of five business bestsellers, including Swim With the Sharks , Beware the Naked Man Who Offers You His Shirt and Dig Your Well Before You're Thirsty...
, all 'kinds of seemingly benign guile are encouraged', on the principle that 'status displays matter: just don't be suckered by them yourself'.
Perhaps the best-known fictional embodiment of the world of the self-help book is Bridget Jones
Bridget Jones
Bridget Jones is a franchise based on the fictional character with the same name. English writer Helen Fielding started her Bridget Jones's Diary column in The Independent in 1995, chronicling the life of Bridget Jones as a thirtysomething single woman in London as she tries to make sense of life...
. Taking 'self-help books...[as] a new form of religion' - 'a kind of secularised religion - a sort of moral values lite' - she struggles to integrate its often conflicting instructions into a coherent whole. 'She must stop beating herself over the head with Women Who Love Too Much
Women Who Love Too Much
Women Who Love Too Much is a self-help book by Robin Norwood published in 1985.The book, was a number one seller on the New York Times Best Seller list's "advice and miscellaneous" category in 1987, is credited with "spawn[ing] a cottage industry in the therapy community." Its premise, that women...
and instead think more towards Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus
Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus
Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus is a book written by American author, and relationship counselor, John Gray.The book has sold more than 7 million copies and is reported to be one of the best selling self-help books of all time...
...see Richard's behaviour less as a sign that she is co-dependent and loving too much and more in the light of him being like a Martian rubber band'. Even she, however, has the occasional crisis of faith, when she wonders: 'Maybe it helps if you've never read a self-help book in your life'.
In the BookWorld
BookWorld
The BookWorld is a fictitious and complex environment that acts as a "behind-the-scenes" area of books. The BookWorld was created by Jasper Fforde in his Thursday Next series...
Companion, it is suggested that 'those of you who have tired of the glitzy world of shopping and inappropriate boyfriends in Chicklit, a trip to Dubious Lifestyle Advice might be the next step. An hour in the hallowed halls of invented ills will leave you with at least ten problems you never knew you had, let alone existed'.
See also
- Conduct bookConduct bookConduct books are a genre of books that attempt to educate the reader on social norms. As a genre, they began in the mid-to-late Middle Ages, although antecedents such as The Maxims of Ptahhotep are among the earliest surviving works...
- A precursor to self-help books from the Middle Ages to the 18th Century. - Mirrors for princes
- Melody BeattieMelody BeattieMelody Beattie is the author of Codependent No More, published in 1987 by the Hazelden Foundation. The book was successful and influential within the self-help movement, selling over eight million copies and introducing the word codependent to the general public.Following the success of Codependent...
- Wendy KaminerWendy KaminerWendy Kaminer is a lawyer and writer. She has written several books on contemporary social issues, including A Fearful Freedom: Women's Flight From Equality, about the conflict between egalitarian and protectionist feminism; I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional: The Recovery Movement and Other...