Customer Reviews

Self-Help, Inc.: Makeover Culture in American Life

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This book isn't the one you turn to when you want an extreme makeover. It's the book you turn to when you want to figure out why you want an extreme makeover to begin with.

Self-Help, Inc. sets out to examine how and why the current self-help culture was created and what its impact is on individuals and society -- and it boldly hits its target dead center.

Dense with facts, history and insight, Self-Help, Inc. examines the movement of self improvement. How did the idea of making oneself better not only start, but become en vogue? What is its impact on the individual, society and the workplace? How does the idea and history of self-improvement differ between men and women (which, as a woman, I found incredibly fascinating)? Where has self-help culture come and where is it going? And what is the long-term advantages and disadvantages of living in a society that puts such a high value on a nearly impossible to achieve "extreme makeover"? Micki McGee, Ph.D., uses her sociology expertise and many years as an NYU professor to answer these questions and more. And she does so with eloquence and intelligence, making this a truly fascinating and illuminating read.

The best part of the book comes at the very beginning, when author McGee takes us through a history of self-help. Coaches and gurus often associate "spirituality" with "prosperity." I must admit I've wondered myself about parallels with early Calvinism and I was intriguted by McGee's thorough review.

I also like the premise of the book. Why has self-help become so popular -- not just in the US, but world-wide? But I had some concerns about the way the question was answered.

First, self-help is a very broad genre. If you think about it, any how-to book can be considered self-help, even "how to plant a greener lawn" or "how to de-clutter your home." So why not have books like "How to cope with difficult people" or "How to find a job you want.

Second, McGee chose an archeological method to evaluate self-help. She chose a collection of texts and analyzed the contents. This method makes sense if say, you turn up a collection of documents on a dig. It's the way many scholars evaluate documents associated with the founding of world religions.

But, as religious scholarship demonstrates, these methods can lead to distorted interpretations. Many scholars emphasize that contemporary readers of the current Bible would have recognized stories as myths and legends, not as absolute truth. \

Since many readers of self-help are alive and accessible, why not ask them how they read and apply self-help to their lives? I believe many readers of self-help read selectively and skeptically. I think readers embark on affirmations and create treasure maps in a playful sense of fun. I don't think most readers study these books with the author's intensity.

And I think most readers (and certainly publishers) recognize the importance of packaging. These days, we've been conditioned by advertising to apply the puffery discount as we make choices and as we read. My own ebook "9 Steps to a new career" sells many more copies with a new title promising a 21-day "extreme career makeover."

Third, some of the author's examples seem misleading. For instance, McGee criticizes Sinetar's definition of "right livelihood" in her best-selling book, Do What You Love: The Money Will Follow.

Actually, Sinetar is one of the most grounded, down-to-earth writers around. She does refer to spirituality and vocation. But that's not woo-woo. In other books and tapes, she's very open about her commitment to Catholicism. An earlier book was about being a monk or mystic in the world.

If you read Do What You Love with care, her message really is, "Do what you love: the money will follow, but not very much or very fast." I've recommended her tapes of To Build the Life You Want, Create the Work You Love and The Mentor's Spirit.

McGee also criticizes Cheryl Richardson's appearance on Oprah. Cheryl's coach-y solutions don't seem to help an overworked, underpaid mom who holds dowon two jobs. True! But I find many coaches have trouble explaining that their approaches are targeted to a specific readership segment.

As I tell my own clients, you need to be at a certain comfort level before you can begin to consider a career change. When you're a few months away from welfare, you need to get back to basics. The harried mother won't benefit from Richardson's techniques...but she also won't benefit from fashion makeovers, power yoga classes or psychoanalysis.

And that brings me to another point: I've been critical of some self-help but I would also ask, "What's the alternative? And what's the harm?" People do face problems that their parents and grandparents never confronted. Mainstream psychology has offered good solutions but also perpetuates ideas that are not backed by research. Carol Tavris has written that popular theories of anger ("let it out") are not accurate. Others have criticized popular mainstream trauma practices ("relive the experience"). Read Annie Paul's book, The Cult of Personality, to learn how psychologists, corporations and courts use tests that have no more validity than horoscopes.

Finally, McGee associates current interest in self-help with economic downturns. But in my experience, most self-help readers come from upscale, educated backgrounds. I believe it was Pascal Boyer who suggested that New Age is the first religion to be created in an era of prosperity. Readers, coaching clients and Tony Robbins followers want to know how to make good lives better (although they may not use those phrases consciously).

Bottom line: We need a solid analytical discussion of self-help. McGee offers a starting point. I'll be interested to see more.

Wow, this book rocked my world and greatly inflenced my own work as an dance/theater/art maker. McGee wizely points to the underlying currents of personal darkness that result not from our relationships, our schools, our government, but rather from our hyper-competitive economy. This book made me question the fundamental paradigm that runs my own life/how I cope with life and left me in a challenged yet honest and hopeful place.

I thought this was a great piece of work. Other reviewers have provided a lot of the context and content of the book from their own perspectives here, so I won't be redundant. What strikes me as most useful about the book is the perspective that modern self-help texts are based on an isolationist and decontextualized perspective of the "self." They mirror modern hegemonic methods and views.

Love this book! It addresses the mysterious question of who does all the grunt work in the lives of so-called "self-made men (people)?" McGee says it is the "belabored self" who is busy raising kids, doing laundry, and cleaning bathrooms. With a sociologist's eye for larger social dynamics, McGee deconstructs the self-help industry as a tool of oppression to maintain the status quo (and does this well).

Lose your job? Don't complain or be a "victim" but "buck-up" and talk nonsense about how it is the greatest thing that ever happened to you! Lose your marriage? Don't wallow in self-pity but think positive! Feel hopeless? Don't worry the "universe" has a plan for you if you can just focus on abundance. This is a splendid critique of one of the most vapid American phenomena- the idea that you "invent" yourself. People like Tom Peters should be clubbed unconscious with this book.

A warning to those who are at risk of losing themselves in self-help.... which in balance is a complement to living well ... but in excess is just as bad as any other addiction. Self-help is a form of refuge for those who are seeking family, have an orphan complex, or who don't know the difference between living and escapism in psuedo-life. There are moments when one needs to be intensive in their healing but eventually one must come back to the world and be in life. It is no different than people who escape by hobbies, religion, work, etc. Help yourself with a dose of self-help but don't binge on it either. A very telling account of the state of affairs in human culture - the therapist replaces the priest and self-help movements take over the church. Lost souls still congregate.

Self-help also has its dark side: a culture of balme, unlimited thinking promoted to embark in action without concern for the consequence on others, a magical thinking that allows one to coast, and of course ... the relentless use of double speak in self-help circles. Many self-help circles cross the line whereby they give permission to go after what one desires even if it may mean some unhappy consequences for innocent people. Do not throw out your sense of common sense - ever! And these self-help mastros are very convincing. A piece of advice: follow the money... that's the guidance that help break the scandal of Watergate. FOLLOW THE MONEY.... and choose a self-help course because you really want to do it and it is an adjunct to your life, not a replacement. See lesson from the est movement ... and never allow your own independant thoughts to be replaced by another with an agenda, often monetary.

I've read a lot of self-help books and sometimes ideas in them work, and sometimes they don't. What I loved about this book is that it gave me the history of these sorts of books. I had no idea that the ideas in self-help books went so far back in time.

Fun to read, though not a speed-read . . . Lots of great quotes, images, and ideas. I loved this book. I'm buying copies for all my friends who are hooked on self-help.

This has been the season for self-help exposes, and as someone who considers himself "in recovery" from the genre, I've read them all now--not just McGee's book, but Salerno's "SHAM" and Hoff-Sommers and Satel's "One Nation Under Therapy." For my money, McGee's book, though on its surface the most "scholarly" of the three, is also the least satisfying.

"Self-Help Inc." is basically a hodge-podge of pseudo-intellectual pretense, masquerading as social theory, that by its end devolves into a shameless paean to socialism. The book also drips with the sort of patronizing sociopolitical "enlightenment" that has so endeared the academy, and its hifalutin members, to mainstream America. The author brandishes her obsession with being (or at least seeming) "uber-deep," a tendency that handicaps so much of the social commentary emerging from academia. Indeed, McGee's writing is so pregnant with ivory tower argot that one assumes the subtitle--that line about the "makeover culture"--almost had to have been some bright-eyed marketing type's attempt to make the book sound hipper and more culturally relevant.

McGee does do a nice job of examining self-help's historical pedigree and underpinnings. She follows Anthony Robbins' spiel back to the New Thought movement of the early 20th century; she discerns Cotton Mather in Covey, and Emerson in the high priests of the New Age. Whereas Salerno argues that the movement cleaves into "victimization" and "empowerment," McGee divides the field into its "rational" and "expressive" sub-movements. (One supposes that she might have had her academic-in-good-standing card revoked for simply bracketing the dichotomy as "thoughts vs. feelings.") Again, this inclination to overreach, to look for complex philosophical explanations when quite-simple ones will do nicely, is par for the course. Also, at least in the view of this former self-help junkie, McGee makes the serious mistake of assuming that the broad appeal of self-help has to do with conscious striving, rather than subtler, more complex emotional forces. One doubts, for example, that the millions who slavishly watch Dr. Phil do so for reasons having to do with Nietzsche or Emerson, or even purposeful self-improvement. (McGraw is a textbook case in the mindless culture [or cult?] of celebrity that underlies so much of the self-help phenomenon, and its amazing ability to shatter its own records again and again.)

She asserts that people turn to self-help's "rational" side to learn to excel in a dog-eat-dog world, then repair to the "expressive" side as an escape from the foregoing. Is it me, or is McGee not guilty here of the same overblown, Rube Goldberg-like reasoning for which Salerno, Satel and Hoff-Sommers chastise the self-help movement itself? After all, is the essential dynamic here--working hard, then looking for a way to unwind/recharge--really so revolutionary?

Throughout the book, McGee's feminism is also showing, and sometimes in a most unbecoming way. Almost gratuitously, she feels compelled to explode the myth of the self-made man (by observing offhand that every successful man in history has had a good woman behind him, holding down home and hearth) and she characterizes success training and life coaching as bastardized children born of men's fear of having women move into the workplace and figuratively emasculate them. But her contentions about self-help's more sexist elements seem woefully out of touch with the available evidence, since self-help's feminizing effect on society (by every traditional benchmark of what it means to be "feminine") is significant and indisputable. Regardless of how you analyze the movement or label its component parts, can there be any doubt that self-help's overriding messages privilege feelings over thoughts, camaraderie over individual excellence, getting along over getting ahead? The truth of the matter seems not so much that people turn to self-help as a refuge from rampant feminism, but that self-help, certainly over the past few generations, has been one of the most important social forces underlying rampant feminism, and friendly to its goals.

McGee's determination to force-fit all evidence or observed phenomena into a preconceived framework is equally clear in her fondness for evaluating self-help regimens based on whether they could be rejiggered to support "progressive" political solutions. In the grips of this pluralistic, it-really-does-take-a-village mentality, she even suggests that recovery groups might marshal and redirect their energies to become latter-day communes of social activism.

Overall, McGee insists on bracketing self-help as a creature of competition-for jobs, mates, etc. It isn't long before one gets the sense that her real target is the free market itself, and it's that which really differentiates her book from SHAM and One Nation, both of which conceive self-help as more of a left-wing-influenced (or influencing) phenomenon. And correctly so, in my view.

I plowed through this pedantic dissertation expecting some insight since this book was published by Oxford Univerity Press. I want to add to the excellent negative critiques posted here that her research on the self-help movement was about 15 years out of date. Moreover, I'm afraid that McGee misunderstood Eckart Tolle's work. One hopes this is due to her selective "skimming" rather than inability to understand Buddhist-based thought.Ultimately as much a waste of time as "The Secret." Ms. McGee's thesis is set upon an "either/or" straw dog argument that finding one's "authentic" self negates socialization and community. If that were so, how would she explain the plethora of self-help groups, which she interestingly doesn't discuss. Fortunately I got the book from the library. Unfortunately, I now owe two days overdue fine that I should bill to Oxford University Press. Great title and cover though!

This book has its good points, particularly where McGee is talking about how we got to where we are today, or analyzing the forces that make self-help what it is. But I don't really understand how that's supposed to help us find our way out of this mess, and to me, that's the crux of it: Okay, here we are, what do we do now? Really, the amount of practical advice in this book is nil. I realize that in a way if the author gave advice she'd be in effect writing a self-help book of her own, and that was not she set out to do. Still, you'd think that at the very least the book would help you understand which self-help program is better than which other program, where to go for real help if you need it, etc., and that's something McGee never gets around to doing. So in the end what's the point? Just to tell us what is? Anybody who's ever put on Oprah or Dr. Phil knows the score there without needing somebody like McGee to tell us.