Optimizing the Self

Social representations of self-help

Ole Jacob Madsen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138712959
• eBook ISBN: 9781317437765
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book provides an analysis of the social representations of leading self-help genres, including neurolinguistic programming, cognitive self-help therapy, mindfulness, self-management, self-esteem, self-leadership and self-control. Exploring the globalised therapeutic culture of today, the book argues that psychology as 'science' is often abandoned to aid the individual pursuit for self-realization and self-optimization. Opposing the view that self-help culture is external to psychology, Madsen argues that it is firmly embedded within psychology, playing an important role in people's lives.

Each chapter traces and critically interprets a range of self-help philosophies and techniques, examining the claims of self-help literature to represent the most innovative psychological, medical or neurobiological research. Discussing each genre in turn, chapters examine key research alongside self-help literature to explore the effectiveness and impact of leading self-help genres in various social contexts and environments. The book offers a contemporary critical overview of issues concerning self-help, combining critical psychology with the theory of social representation to provide a broad perspective on self-help as a valid psychology.

Optimizing the Self will be of interest to academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of social representation, critical and cultural psychology and theory, clinical psychology, and the sociology of culture and science. The book will also be of use to critical and cultural psychologists and theorists, as well as clinical psychologists.

Chapter 1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781315693866-3

In Happiness, Will Ferguson's (2002) satire of the self-help industry, we meet the unassuming and disillusioned Edwin Vincent de Valu, who works as an assistant editor for the New York–based publisher Panderic Press. One of Edwin's most important tasks consists in evaluating the endless piles of manuscripts submitted by hopeful, aspiring authors. As a rule, their dreams run aground on Edwin's desk, where they are met with a standard rejection along the lines of ‘Your project is unfortunately not suitable for our current needs, but we hope you will consider Panderic also in the future.’ One day, however, Edwin discovers an unusual manuscript entitled What I learned on the mountain – a typewritten, colossal, 1000-page-long draft of a self-help book signed under the pseudonym Rajee Tupak Soiree, which the publisher then decides to publish. The book will in the subsequent months not only change Edwin and his publishing company forever, but the entire American economy, as it turns out. Ferguson's satirical novel is based on the following hypothetical situation: what would happen if a self-help book actually proved to be 100% effective? What I learned on the mountain is therefore intended to represent the ultimate self-help book, which conveniently synthesizes the messages of all former well-considered attempts in the genre. The book gives the reader solutions for everything he or she might be seeking help with − from how to quit smoking, to weight loss, to becoming happy by accepting oneself for who one is. Edwin is the first person to understand the fatal consequences of suddenly curing people of their vices and increasing the feeling of happiness in the population. According to Edwin, the problem with making people happy is that the entire economy is built around human weaknesses, bad habits and insecurities, which explain the current popularity of things like fashion, fast food, sports cars, techno-gadgets, sex toys, diet centres, hair clubs for men, personal ads, fringe religious sects, professional sports teams and so on. And if America goes, the rest of the Western world will soon follow in an end-of-the-history cataclysm.

The consequences of the book's release onto the market become quickly apparent and culminate in Edwin's receiving a death threat from the local mafia, who have considerable interests invested in people's depraved consumption of tobacco, alcohol and narcotics and who fear for their livelihood now that the consumption of everything that is bad for us drops dramatically. To escape this reverse fatwa, Edwin is obliged to try and stop the book's continued dissemination in order to save his own life. Towards the end of the book Edwin finally succeeds in tracking down the real author. He turns out to be a dying, cancer-stricken old grouch who has only written the book in order to leave his grandchild a substantial inheritance from the sales revenues. Luckily for Edwin, it turns out that the author shares his tragic view of the world – being human is in its profoundest sense about being chronically dissatisfied and unhappy – and the author therefore goes along with the publication of an anti-self-help book – How to be miserable – as an antidote to the happiness epidemic. Happiness ends in what is virtually a religious conflict between the part of the population who continue to cling to the happiness formula of the first book and those who have allowed themselves to be convinced by the pessimistic sequel.

Happiness is first and foremost entertaining to read, but it contains astute insights on the fundamental paradox of self-help literature. Or as Edwin tellingly puts it: ‘I mean, the entire reason we have so many damn self-help books is because they don't work!’ (Ferguson, 2002, p. 131). Happiness is not, however, completely unambiguous on this point. The true scandal that unfolds is that of a self-help book that actually makes the readers happy – it leads to nothing less than the gradual breakdown of civilization. As such, Ferguson opens indirectly for the question of whether the self-help industry as a social institution has perhaps never been intended to work, in the obvious sense, but all the same serves a purpose. In other words, that its role is to serve as a kind of opium of the people in a secular age, an opium which in addition to this provides sustenance for an entire industry. The question of whether it works and for whom it works is thereby open to debate. It is certainly extremely doubtful whether the majority of self-help books actually result in non-smoking, thinner or happier readers. But if on the other hand one defines ‘works’ here as meaning offering the reader a moral, spiritual, pseudo-scientific or scientific framework of guidance on how one is to manage oneself, one's work and free time, then it does do this in a sense. Otherwise it could not have achieved the level of penetration that it has today, and one would have explained its dominant presence in Western culture as some type of hoax or conspiracy. This is, indeed, what to a large extent occurs in Happiness, in that the foremost duty of self-help literature appears to be to represent a recruitment institution for the American consumer society's dependence on restless souls who willingly allow themselves to be led to purchase new lifestyle products, experiences and identity markers in the name of self-realization. The reading of self-help from the perspective of ideological criticism, as I hope to demonstrate through this book, is increasingly relevant, but as I will return to in later chapters, we must perhaps put self-help into a broader cultural, religious and scientific context in order to fully understand its ambiguous role in contemporary society.

The status of self-help literature in 2015

If you should drop by any bookstore in the Western world, almost independent of its size you will almost always be able to find a section devoted to self-help literature. In my home country, Norway, even the university bookstores are now accessorized with self-help books. This was not the case at the end of the 1990s when I was a student. This reflects how university bookstores are struggling to hold their own in the increasing competition with E-commerce and are therefore obliged to carry popular best sellers. It can also be an indication that self-help books have achieved broader penetration than they had previously and are now read by the entire spectrum of the population, including students. The bookstores’ shelves labelled ‘personal development’, ‘lifestyle’ and ‘health’ are literally overflowing with more or less seductive promises of how you can get your life in order or find happiness. The phenomenon of self-help books is not new in any sense, but in recent years the scope of self-help has apparently grown larger than before, and self-help is apparently acquiring an ever stronger penetration within the context of professional treatment, in Great Britain, for example (Berge & Repål, 2012). A trend in the 2000s that supports this is the increasing number of well-known professionals doing research in the fields of medicine, psychology and nutrition who write self-help books tailor-made for the commercial market (Cherry, 2011; Madsen, 2014). Three more recent examples of this tendency in Norway are professor of medicine Ingvard Wilhelmsen's (2011) popular book Stop feeling sorry for yourself, professor of psychology Espen Røysamb's (2013) book Be happier and professor of nutrition Birger Svihus's (2008) book Slim with the obesity factor. The common feature is how to take care of oneself. As former Minister of Health Jonas Gahr Støre allegedly stated in connection with the launch of the new campaign for the Directorate of Health in the autumn of 2012: ‘We are all our own ministers of health’ (as cited in Amundsen, 2012, p. 14).

In spite of these possible displacements of the boundaries between popular science and serious science, and low culture and high culture in recent times, there is, relatively speaking, still a lack of systematic and critical analyses of self-help as a field of knowledge. Between the one-sided exaltation of self-help literature on the part of authors with books to sell and the blasé rejection on the part of the intellectual elite, there is a vacuum (Gauntlett, 2008; Kruse, 2012). A small niche of cultural studies done on self-help literature does exist internationally, but these often appear in scientific journals that are not written for the general public. I have failed to find a single Norwegian non-fiction book published between 1990 and today that addresses the theme. You will likewise be searching in vain if you should look up ‘self-help’ in a comprehensive reference work such as Aschehoug and Gyldendal's encyclopedia Store norske leksikon, including their updated online edition. This is odd, given self-help's ever more invasive character. Perhaps this is now in the process of changing, in step with self-help literature's penetration into the core of Western culture. In the Norwegian media there has been an increase in the critical awareness of the phenomenon in the last two years, and author Agnes Ravatn (2012a, 2012b, 2013a, 2013b, 2013c), among others, has written about self-help classics in a series for the Norwegian national daily Dagbladet, and the writer Bjørn Stærk (2013) has addressed the phenomenon in his column on the online daily Aftenposten.no. This book is therefore meant as a contribution in the form of a cultural analysis that aims to illuminate the phenomenon of self-help. My approach can be defined as critical and investigatory. I will neither a priori accept that, generally speaking, self-help actually helps, nor reject out of hand the idea that self-help can be viewed as carrying out an important function in the increasingly introspective life of the late modern individual. It is fundamental to our existence in a so-called post-traditional society that we must create ourselves, as the British sociologist Anthony Giddens (1991, p. 70) pointed out already two decades ago: ‘What to do? How to act? Who to be? These are focal questions for everyone living in circumstances of late modernity – and ones which, on some level or another, all of us answer, either discursively or through day-to-day social behaviour.’ Hence, the demand for sources of authority offering moral, religious or scientific guidelines for the ever more pressing task of being oneself is considerable.

History: The meaning of self-help

Self-help books today are first and foremost associated with personal development, but more recently the term ‘self-help’ has come to refer specifically to the individual and to the self's psychological disposition. The term selvhjelp (self-help) is defined by the Norwegian dictionary Norsk riksmålsordbok as meaning ‘to help oneself’. Historically speaking, self-help was frequently about nations’ internal affairs, where the ideal was to be economically self-sufficient, without a need for help from other countries. For example, the Norwegian newspaper Nationen in 1933 used the phrase ‘national self-help in times of war and crisis’. Within the field of economics we even find the origin of the still much-used expression ‘help to self-help’, which is now often used in reference to giving people the tools to manage on their own, but which originally involved a financial aid scheme that was supposed to enable a country to become self-sufficient (Ordnett.no, 2012b).

Today most of us do not associate self-help with economics and the management of a country's national affairs, unless one is a political scientist or a developmental aid worker by profession, but rather, predominantly, with psychology and the management of an individual human being's pursuits and concerns – in other words, the control of an individual's goals, motivation and resources. Providing help to self-help acquires a new field of reference, that of giving individuals the most expedient principles for self-management so that they shall manage to achieve the goals they have set by themselves − whether this be a matter of losing weight, quitting smoking, warding off negative thoughts, achieving personal success or leading oneself and others. It can appear as if a displacement has occurred in the primary meaning of ‘self-help’ in society, from the level of the nation state to the level of the individual, and from contents that were for the most part about economics and management to contents which today are more than anything about taking care of oneself. It is as if the responsibility has shifted downward a notch or two. Readers familiar with the French philosopher Michel Foucault's (2007) magnificent analyses of the power shifts in the eighteenth century during the transition from feudal states to industrial society in the West, from territories to the population to the individual citizen, will be able to recognize a similar pattern within self-help. The greatest possible amount of national independence and self-reliance developed into the greatest possible amount of individual autonomy and self-control. Others have in a similar fashion highlighted how the contents of the ‘spirit of capitalism’, which the German sociologist Max Weber claimed to find in Benjamin Franklin's classic Necessary hints to those who would be rich, published for the first time in 1736, have shifted from being about having the self-discipline to save one's money to self-discipline applied in a number of private domains, such as one's appetite, body or sex life (Hochschild, 1994). Management of personal finances has in the course of a few centuries slowly been expanded to management of ourselves.

It is possible to discern a number of inherent contradictions in this displacement of the catchment area of self-help. The self-help and help-to-self-help ideal was originally controlled by national economic considerations, both in a purely financial sense and, more politically, in that Norway, for example, would be putting itself in a vulnerable situation if it were to be at all times dependent upon its neighbouring countries to keep the wheels turning. The principles of self-help within an economics context are, in other words, regulated by specific finance policy legalities or interests which one of necessity would want to adhere to in order to survive. The value of a nation's ability to be self-sufficient, especially in times of war and crisis, is thereby relatively non-controversial within political science today.

However, what we can call the laws of self-help become, when we step over into personal concerns and the catchment area of psychology, much vaguer and less given. And no, I have not forgotten about the ‘law of attraction’ from Rhonda Byrne's (2006) book The Secret, 21 million copies of which have been sold at this moment worldwide. This ‘law’ which stipulates that if one just thinks positive thoughts, then one will attract desirable things and vice versa, qualifies in all likelihood as a candidate for our times’ most suspect scientific law, which simultaneously makes the claim of being just that. But as I will return to in Chapter 2, one is in for a disappointment if one believes in the idea that humans as rational beings solely applaud self-help books that are actually based on scientific evidence. If an individual goes to the trouble of acquiring a self-help book which, quite simply, actually helps that individual produce a desired change, it is indeed an uncontested benefit for that individual, but as I will show, the meaning, utility and necessity of this operation is often far less demonstrable than the state of Norway's ability to manage on its own during the economic recession of the 1930s. It can therefore seem peculiar that something as unessential as ‘self-help’ has today become a billion-dollar industry (Schulz, 2013) which apparently keeps expanding every year. But as I will discuss below, self-help's formidable success is perhaps due precisely to self-help's relatively diffuse essence, offering only a vague promise of improvement, in that it is easy to sell when it is correspondingly difficult to impose any clear demands on it.

Scope: Self-help beyond the market and the state

Self-help is today a fully pervasive phenomenon in society, which cannot be limited solely to the commercial market but also penetrates state visions and strategies for improving public health. In Norway in the twenty-first century, self-help has become an important objective in the work of strengthening public health. As a part of the acceleration plan for mental health (1999–2008), the then Ministry of Health and Social Affairs (now the Ministry of Health and Care Services) produced a key document entitled The national plan for self-help (Ministry of Health and Social Affairs, 2004), in which there was a strong emphasis on concepts such as empowerment, self-management and user participation. The national plan also maintains that increased self-help work in Norway is a measure that targets the strengthening of the individual's ability and possibility to take part in his or her own change process. The national plan is to stimulate from above the building of networks that safeguard the basis for self-help work throughout the country. The long-term goal is to make self-help universally availab...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Series editor’s foreword
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Cognitive science
• 3 Mindfulness
• 4 Self-leadership
• 5 Self-esteem
• 6 Self-control
• 7 Conclusion
• References
• Index