Customer Reviews

I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional: The Recovery Movement and Other Self-Help

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

One reason why Kaminer's book is so excellent is that she doesn't limit herself to the product of obvious flakes such as Werner Erhard and Shirley MacLaine but also goes after stuff taken seriously by millions of folks who are otherwise intelligent and reasonable -- books such as *The Road Less Traveled* and *People of the Lie*. Kaminer shows how their content, when it's not merely vapid, is wrong or even dangerous.

Here's Kaminer on "discipline" and the power of evil, or rather on their description in *Road* and *Lie*:

"'With total discipline we can solve all problems,' [Peck] promises in the opening pages ... and discipline itself is only a 'system of techniques.' As for evil, it is 'strangely ineffective as a social force,' which would surprise anyone who has even heard of genocide...."

And now more on evil and discipline, from *Lie*. (Yes, evil -- which you'll remember is "strangely ineffective as a social force" and thus perhaps is of less concern to Peck's devotees than to the rest of us.)

"Peck defines evil as 'the unsubmitted will ... it's almost tempting to think that the problem of evil lies in the will itself ..." There are only two states of being: submission to God and goodness or the refusal to submit to anything beyond one's own will -- which refusal automatically enslaves one to the forces of evil. Ultimately, the only good thing you can will is willingness.

"Liberals, romantics, and any student of totalitarianism may find this chilling. There is surely enough recent historical evidence associating submission, not independence of will, with enslavement to evil. In their eagerness to submit, not everyone can distinguish God from the devil."

Bravo Wendy Kaminer! I'm sorry to note that this book is out of print. It should be back in print and continue to be widely available, not merely as a stern corrective to silliness but also as an antidote to the barely hidden danger of much pop psychology and pop religiosity.

There are at least two types of eloquence: one is stating the case in a manner that those already in agreement will applaud, and the other is arguing persuasively. Kaminer's book has been hailed for its exhortations and wit by foes of the "self-help" movement, whatever that is exactly. Fans of the books that she criticizes are undoubtably outraged. The skeptical will be unimpressed.

The irony is, one of Kaminer's chief complaints about the somewhat ill-defined self-help movement is that it blunts our critical thinking: she wants a nation of critical thinkers who won't analyze this book too closely. Kaminer doesn't offer any analytical evidence of how the self-help movement actually affects our society, she merely utters extremely vague warnings" "imagine the effect ... ." Nor does she have much evidence as to how people typically use self-help: a reader might gain useful insights without letting the book rule their life or joining a cult around the author. The "self-help movement" is a phrase that is tossed around a great deal, but what is Kaminer actually referring to? Any book that lumps together Norman Vincent Peale, Wicca, Alcoholics Anonymous and M. Scott Peck is covering a lot of ground. (It has never occurred to me to think of Wicca as a "self-help movement"; I guess Kaminer just doesn't like it and decided to throw it in for good measure.) All of philosophy and theology could be thrown into such a broad categorization. It would have been better if Kaminer had stuck to specific criticisms of specific books instead of trying to generalize about such a variety of works.

Kaminer's main arguments are two - one is that if you agree with her, the two of you will share the pleasure of sneering smugly at others. Secondly, she keeps informing us that whatever it is doesn't appeal to her as if we should be just overwhelmed that ***!!!!Wendy Kaminer!!!!*** doesn't approve.

I actually read this a long time ago. It came back to me when I was reading Paul Collins' fascinating The Trouble with Tom: The Strange Afterlife and Times of Thomas Paine, and read the discussion of phrenology in the early 19th century. Kaminer seems to assume that all this is a recent phenomenon, falling back, I suppose, on the common tendency to think that things are going to pot these days but were much better at some vague time in the past. Actually, books of advice have been extremely popular since the the printing press made reading materials generally available: they were the best sellers of 16th century England. Moreover, most of these books are based, legitimately or otherwise, on psychology and/or religion, both of which predate our time. Kaminer has indicated a respect for psychology in other books, and religion certainly preceded the founding of the Republic that she argues is now endangered by self-help books. So what has happened? She compares, for example, a belief in the 12-step higher power with devotion to a political demagogue. In the first place, a disembodied, individually conceived "higher power" is not capable of running for President-for-Life. In the second place, how does this differ from religion in general (which Kaminer never directly deals with)? Indeed, religious movements seem to me to be far more likely to be used for demagoguery: when was AA a voting bloc?

Some people do get pretty silly over these books, but is that because of the book, or because they're silly? Are their individual lives actually better or worse without the book? I know several people who work professionally with alcoholics who think that AA can be tremendously helpful. Sure, it would be better if no-one was inclined towards alcoholism, but that isn't one of the choices. The members of AA, et al., feel that they are better off with the program than without it. Kaminer gives us no reason to believe that she is a better judge of what is good for them than they are.

Toward the end of her book, she expresses her hope that we will drop all this nonsense and learn to think sharply and insightfully. She doesn't explain how she expects people who are too moronic to read these advice books critically are supposed to effect this transformation.

If, like me, you've been simultaneously fascinated and appalled by the wares of the "self-help" or "psychology" sections of your local bookstore (or ubiquitous cyberbookstore), you'll enjoy seeing it dissected and skewered by Wendy Kaminer, the rare person to have applied her brain to this stuff (and someone who has even attended a variety of [fill in this blank] Anonymous meetings and other non-events).

Nowhere does Kaminer deny that actual people get seriously screwed up by abusive parents, booze, dope, etc. What dismays her are the lack of perspective and the rejection of any use of a critical intelligence. What worries her are the tendencies of the therapists, gurus and quacks to reinforce and play on the helplessness of their paying customers.

Kaminer is surprisingly generous to people whose activities she finds generally obnoxious, for example conceding that the most moronic TV shows occasionally illuminate real problems. This is an even-handed book from a writer who refreshingly says at the start:

"I have only opinions and ideas; so although I imagine myself engaging in a dialogue with my readers, I don't imagine that we constitute a fellowship, based on shared experiences. Nor do I pretend to love my readers, any more than they love me and countless other strangers."

It's a sad state of affairs when a writer feels compelled to say something this obvious.

Many people will be dismayed by Kaminer's principled refusal to provide platitudinous or trite answers to the problems (real or imagined) of the day. They'll be happier with such opuscules as *Seven Habits of Highly Effective People*. Of this book, Kaminer asks, "what are the seven habits?" and quotes Covey:

"In harmony with the natural laws of growth, they provide an incremental, sequential, highly integrated approach to the development of personal and interpersonal effectiveness.... They become the basis of the person's character, creating an empowering center of correct maps from which an individual can effectively solve problems, maximize opportunities, and continually learn and integrate other principles in an upward spiral of growth."

-- and Kaminer comments:

"I doubt that many readers know what this means (I don't), but they know how it makes them feel. Covey seduces them with all the right buzzwords: harmony, integrate, interpersonal, maximize, effectiveness, empowering (eventually he gets around to synergy). His peroration, the 'upward spiral of growth' (a phrase he repeats often), is uplifting, if you don't mind feeling like a corkscrew. Covey has a useful talent for saying nothing inspiringly; he should write commencement speeches."

This wasn't the only point where I laughed out loud. *I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional* is a worthy successor to Mark Twain's *Christian Science*.

Ms. Kaminer's book was interesting to read and shows that she spent a lot of time and effort researching the recovery movement and other self-help trends. However, I was ultimately struck by her profound ignorance of human psychology and the very real suffering that mental illness and family dysfunction can cause, even among the econaomically privilaged. She analyzes everything in terms of what she considers to be "real" problems and problems that for her do not qualify as "real." It's O.K. to complain if you are poor or physically ill or injured. Everyone else should just get a life and stop complaining. In her more paranoid moments, she seems to accuse anyone interested in self-help of being part of some right-wing conspiracy to divert attention away from the needs of the poor. This, despite the fact that almost eveyone in the self-help movement is a liberal. She also ignores the issue of suicide--one of the major causes of death in our society. People from "privilaged" backgrounds kill themselves all the time, so the must have "real problems." In fact, some studies have shown that youth from upper-class environments tend to be under a grat deal of stress because of the constant demands to be more than average and the lack of tolerance for weakness or failure that characterizes our "Yuppie" subculture. Ms. Kaminer also seems skeptical of the reality of physical and sexual abuse and alcolholism among the educated classes, despite overweaming clinical evidence that these diseases are universal. Finally, I would like to point out that she tends to lump people together who have little in common and then tar them all with the same brush. For instance she seems to equate the humane, complex spiritual philosophies of Dr. M. Scott Peck and Rabbi Kushner with the backward religious fundamentalism of people like Dr. James Dobson. Ultimately, the book projects a lack of compassion or understanding for its complex and diverse subject matter.

Ms. Kaminer's superb trashing of the self-help movement is a much-needed book, even if readers have to suffer through the usual secular-humanist misreading of religion. The writer's primary crime in this department consists of the absurd comparison of 12-step meetings to revivalist meetings. Elsewhere, Kaminer simply reads too much into popular culture, searching for a significance that isn't there. "Maybe it's possible to use someone else's jargon to express your own thoughts. Maybe the jargon shapes the thought," she writes in regard to the common language of self-help meetings. Such mundane musings, fortunately, are redeemed by any number of devastating, on-target missiles aimed at the various idiocies, lies, psychobabble cliches, moral contradictions, and logical misfires of the monumentally moronic modern self-help movement.

By the way, I spotted this title in the self-help section of a large bookstore chain. Talk about irony.

Not since Mark Twain's fictional "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" have we had a chance to see hokum and superstition so delightfully trashed by a rational individual. In this case, Wendy Kaminer takes on all of the pseudo-science and pop psychology that surrounds the recovery movement.

For example, she examines the claim that "All families are dysfunctional." As she points out, this is an empty statement. If it is a tautology (true by definition and not subject to testing), then it is uninteresting. However, if it is meant to be an empirical observation, then it has no basis in data (no one ever defined "dysfunctional," came up with a measurable indicator, and conducted a study).

Also, her skewering of Stephen Covey, which is described in someone else's review, is priceless. She irrefutably exposes this best-selling emperor's intellectual nakedness.

Beyond her exposure of the intellectual shortcomings of the recovery movement, Kaminer suggests that it fosters a political agenda that ignores real problems that are class and gender based. This is a more speculative thesis, and while I was not always in agreement, I found the argument stimulating and well worth examining.

What? It's no longer in print? Get those presses rolling!

I first read this book after I'd been subjected to an "intervention," followed by "treatment" for alcohol. As nearly all of those in the "intervention" drank more than I--and still do--and the "treatment" was another temple to insurance mammon, I was a convert to a TRUE skeptic. And the experience compelled me to challenge many a pop psych concept and to read this fine volume.

While I've read much of Kaminer's work since this book, and don't ALWAYS agree with her, this book describes much of the trendy trash which is selling as if there's nothing else to read. (Heaven help us, "The Celestine Prophecy" has sequels! ) I love the vacuuous quote from Steven Covey who's coming up with even more volumes of flatulence (and the "7 habits" of whom a friend recently observed are "nothing but a rehash of the 12 step programs!") Then, as other reviewers mention, there's M. Scott Peck's drivel and that of still another renowned, best-selling psychologist whose name escapes me now. Kaminer challenges his claim that those of us who may have been spanked by mommy when we were 2 are in the same boat with those who were in Pol Pot's concentration camps. Yeah, the guy actually said that. Oh, and that same psychologist has been notorious more recently for his sexual escapades with his groupies.

The book offers a grand overview of the nonsense that pervades the affluent culture these days. For it, I thank Wendy Kaminer, and ask her publisher to print it again, and again.

When I first wrote this review, I suggested it be back in print. Now I ask Ms. Kaminer to come out with a second edition! Not only have I read it a few more times--and chuckled with recognition each time I reread it--but my spouse is a clinician. I see the courses she goes through. They are the most insubstantial, jargon-ridden piles of nonsense I've ever heard.

Somehow it doesn't surprise me when I see that most attending the courses are from the most affluent suburbs of Washington, DC. People who take the stuff of which Kaminer writes are from the most affluent segments of the whole society...AND WE'RE SUPPOSED TO LEARN SOMETHING FROM THEM!

Please, Wendy, come out with a second edition with additions of more New Age and "self-help" nonsense. We need to be informed!

I have some reservations about this book; Kaminer is tone-deaf when it comes to the more subtle strains or spiritual thought. But she is right on the money in her criticism of the more self-pitying, materialistic self-help gurus out there. Her book is ditinguished by original reporting and her tough, clear prose is a joy to read. Before you shell out any more money to anyone who claims they can completely transform your life overnight, you must read this.

Ms. Kaminer writes a scathing analysis of many self help books and programs, and does it in an often hilarious way. My background is in Psychology, and I was particularly interested in finding someone who would punch holes in the hot air pop psychology that continues to infiltrate our society. I use the word "continues", because psych fads have been always with us it seems. In my college time it was Maslow's self actualization and I'm OK, you're OK, and the let it all hang out period (1960's in case you weren't around). There were more fashions of the time, but I've forgotten them as has most everyone. Now everyone is indeed a victim. What next? Thank you Wendy for saying what needed to be said.

The author, even with her liberal background, shoots equal-opportunity barbs at such personages as Oprah Winfrey, Geraldo Rivera, Phil Donahue and Ali McGraw, as well as conservative religious and nonreligious persons. She spends much time on that old prototype self-help idea: "positive thinking." She thinks very little of Norman Vincent Peale, and almost nothing of the obscure silliness of Napoleon Hill, an earlier author speaking about thinking to grow rich. Recovery movements conclude two things obvious to any teenager: people like to talk about themselves, and they are mad at their parents. Popular recovery programs actively discourage people from helping themselves, says Wendy Kaminer; these programs are the opposite of what people need. Persons at recovery meetings seem to do much talk-show therapy on themselves.

New Age movements get their own well-deserved chapter in "Dysfunctional." In the final analysis, new-age nonsense gives us a post-literate era, "where language is supposed to covey only an attitude, and a word means no more than a smile." Popular theology also gets its own chapter. Kaminer's temperate nature shows through here, when she observes that some people do get benefit from some of these organizations, though WE suspect that SHE suspects that most of those persons were inclined to be thinking, democratic (small "d") people in the first place. Here are some good tidbits from "Dysfunctional":
· Testimony takes the place of conversation.
· Reading itself has unfortunately become a way of thinking
· Cults emphasizing the helplessness of the individual offer "absolution and no accountability."
· "the marketplace of ideas becomes a marketplace of maxims."

Kaminer uses just enough wisecracking to get the reader to laugh at the absurdities, rather than recoiling from the hard sarcasm that too many writers use. One wishes we could have a quiet talk with her about the real merits of free markets. Her bias away from this direction, though, is slight enough to not distract from the main message. that the outright In her concluding section the libertarian reader's heart will be warmed by Kaminer's thought that too much self-help literature "collectivizes" the quest for individual identity: such literature's aim is standardizing the self. Interesting. The book is reasonably short, and quite smooth to read. If ever there were a serious nonfiction "beach book," this is it!