Customer Reviews

Fool's Paradise: The Unreal World of Pop Psychology

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

It is important to understand that this takes on the world of pop psychology as a subject for literary criticism rather than debating its medical claims, a subject for humorous satire, or by offering its own "therapy". Any of the alternatives would be justified and could have been successful, but I really do appreciate the serious way literary criticism is used in these essays because we get so little of it in our post-modern values-neutral deconstructionist non-judgmental age. Here, instead of a bunch of emotional ranting trying to pass as analysis we get an informed and reasoned approach that demonstrates the ways in which the world of pop psychology has inverted and misused literature from the past, contradicts itself, and actually creates a toxic interpersonal environment.

Stewart Justman teaches English at the University of Montana. He has written previously on psychology, studied at Columbia, and is an award winning essayist. He begins this book with an extended essay on the ways in which pop psychology is intertwined with the Utopian movement of the sixties. Not that one sprang from the other, but that the culture was ripe for both and the mis-readings of Utopian literature led to ignorant writings advocating unworkable system. He shows us how these advocates misuse even our Declaration of Independence and its right to the pursuit of happiness for a right to happiness! He notes that some claim this movement is rooted in American Individualism, but the author wonders if any individualist would so completely submit to the dictates of a Wayne Dyer, Steve Covey, or a Phil McGraw (among countless others).

He goes through a series of seven chapters demonstrating how this literature inverts traditional values and puts its adherents in even greater isolation and dependency. We go through blame, guilt, obligation, patience, choice, morality, and self-transformation. He shows us how serious psychologists such as Maslow and Laing extend us into a narcissistic world where all relationships are about "me" and even children become accoutrements! Where we must realize that all relationships in our life, our family, our religion are all toxic, EXCEPT for our dependency upon our therapist or guru (again, Dyer, Covey, McGraw, and more).

I think the strongest chapters are those devoted directly to literary criticism. Literature Rewritten and Constructing Stories are absolutely terrific and powerful. The author demonstrates the way the reader of this literature is manipulated. It demonstrates how the stories the literature uses also fail the requirements of art and why this important to understand.

The last chapter on liberal guilt is quite entertaining because the author shows how this is a guilt of discussion not emotion. If you actually feel the guilt you talk about something is then wrong and the emotion must be disposed of.

This is a very good book and I strongly recommend it. I hope college students get an opportunity to read it. Of course, having a professor of the quality of this author would help the class discussion a great deal. Still, this book can help any reader understand better so much of what is going on in our culture and why it is not only wrong, but very damaging to its adherents and their accoutrements.

I read this book after listening to the author in a radio talk show. On the air, his comments on the history of psychology were surprisingly vague; he was irritable, and rebuked callers (some therapists) who moderately tried to consider some benefits of pop psychology. Nonetheless, I reasoned, maybe the book is better...

It raises good points againt pop psychology: that it is solipsistic, blindly non-judgemental, immediatist, and formulaic. The author also makes interesting, even if loose, associations between pop psychology and the civil rights movement and classic Romanticism.

However, the author totally ignores the vast scholarship on individualism trends, counterculture and the New Age, and never considers what psychologists or readers may have to say about pop psychology. A textual analysis that reinvents the wheel, and ignores the producers and consumers of the cultural texts under consideration, is anything but persuasive.

Yet, what ultimately undermines the book is its excessively corrosive style. The essay basically is the outraged opinion of someone who read a bunch of self-help books and utterly hated them. With no further justifications, the author indulges in an overkill strategy of restless sarcasm that becomes quite tiring after a while. The angry essay unfortunately backfires on what could otherwise be a compelling critique of pop psychology.

For a balanced analysis, Anthony Giddens' "Transformation of Intimacy" considers pop psychology in the context of social reflexivity and growing demands for interpretations of the self. Anthony D'Andrea examines pop body therapies and New Age spiritualities in the book "Global Nomads: New Age and Techno as Transnational Countercultures."

[PS: curious how low-starred reviews tend to be voted "unhelpful", regardless of their intrinsic merit...]

Justman clearly exposes many of the contradictions and outright bouts of logical errors found in self-help tomes. He rightly describes the way self-help authors seek to estalish themselves as your one true friend, while accusing the rest of the world, especially your parents and any traditional insitutions, of conspiring to make you unhappy. Today's self help gurus rant against tradition and the past, while blindly building on the past tradition of the self help movement. I give Justman 4 stars because I think there are some self-help books, authors and techniques that can be useful. Not all of them can be pigeonholed as snake oil. Anyone who reads self-help books should read Fool's Paradise to get a different perspective on the subject. I would also recommned Paul Pearsall's The Last Self-Help Book You'll Ever Need. Pearsall, a practicing psychologist, offers critique's of self-help backed up by studies, while at the same time allowing for self-help to be, well, helpful.

Though I largely agree with the author's overall thesis of the shallowness of pop psychology, I nevertheless found this book wanting. First, it was very long-winded, taking many more pages than was necessary to make its point. It could have been an essay in the New Yorker, The Atlantic, or Harper's. Second, it was sorely lacking in any references to empirical studies that might definitively put the lie to claims of pop psychology. Instead, the author's main authorities are Dostoevsky, Isaiah Berlin, Charles Dickens, Hannah Arendt, and others from classical literature. While I find these authors enjoyable and even insightful at times, I hardly lean on them as authorities of empirical science, and it is empirical science that offers the strongest critiques of the claims of pop psychology.

So in the end, you have to decide whether your personal preference is for the traditional authorities Justman recognizes or the New Age writers he's trying to discredit. There's little basis for picking one over the other. If you have an inkling that pop psychology is superficial intellectual claptrap, you'll likely applaud the author's sometimes acerbic criticisms. If you buy into the beliefs of Phil McGraw, Wayne Dyer, and their ilk, then you'll likely dismiss the author's polemic. But for those readers looking for a well-considered, empirically based critique of pop psychology's celebrated gurus, there's woefully little to latch onto. If you're curious about the book, see if you can get it at your local library.

Without even needing to resort to the scientific evidence against the ideas of pop psychology (especially its emphasis on self-esteem), this book presents a devastating critique of such writers as Wayne Dyer, Scott Peck, and Dr. Phil. Justman makes use of great literature to show just how shallow pop psychology's doctrines and ideas about human nature are. He also shows the obvious self-contradictions of these writers. One is their claim to be on the reader's side against all authority, all the while maintaining their own unquestioned authority and pontificating on self-realization and the evils of Western society. Interestingly, Justman shows how the claims of pop psychology grew out of the utopian fantasies of the 60s and 70s and are similarly totally out of line with reality. Another unrealistic, irrational element is their view that jettisoning morality will result in more moral people. Yet the total selfishness they advocate can hardly be expected to produce more ethical people (as in fact it hasn't). Finally, self-help book writers reject tradition yet plagiarize and parrot each other's advice, showing they have established their own kind of conventional wisdom. A brilliant debunking of this widespread nonsense.

Stewart Justman shoots a diseased sacred cow in Fool's Paradise. He systematically, logically, and humorously holds Pop Psychology and its practitioners in front of a spotlight to strip away the nonsense and reveal their pseudo-science for what it is - repetitive, self sustaining, Utopianism for children.

The author describes the self-awareness, discover and liberate your inner child movement as narcissism struggling against the evils of morality, responsibility, and duty. It's a great book for those stuck in a destructive loop of, "maybe the next self help book will make me happy."