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Fool's Paradise: The Unreal World of Pop Psychology Hardcover – July 7, 2005

4.0 out of 5 stars 8 customer reviews

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Product Details

  • Hardcover: 276 pages
  • Publisher: Ivan R. Dee; First Edition edition (July 7, 2005)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 1566636280
  • ISBN-13: 978-1566636285
  • Product Dimensions: 6.7 x 1 x 9 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,485,016 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Top Customer Reviews

Format: Hardcover
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...]
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Format: Hardcover
There is a wealth of information on the counterculture's way of being subversive for individuals who want more in life than fitting in to a culture of paternal domination./ Skip Spence's song Little Hands if an open invitation to join a world of what children want. At the end of the song, a few verses describe ways to stop drooping the kiddies off at the pool:

Little hands clasping
Truth they are grasping
A world with no pain for one and all

And they are learning
Their souls, they are yearning
A nice place to play and no place to fall
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Format: Hardcover
Stewart Justman is a professor of English at the University of Montana; he has also written books such as Artificial Epidemics: How Medical Activism Has Inflated the Diagnosis of Prostate Cancer and Depression, The Jewish Holocaust for Beginners, To Feel What Others Feel: Social Sources of the Placebo Effect, etc. He wrote in the Preface of this 2005 book, "This book traces the inspiration of the pop psychology movement to the utopianism of the 1960s and argues that it consistently misuses the rhetoric of civil rights. Speaking as it does in the name of my right to happiness, pop psychology promises liberation from all that interferes with my power to create the self I want. In so doing it not only defies reality but corrodes the traditions and attachments that give depth and richness to human life." (Pg. vii)

He goes on, "The influence of pop psychology now extends from the preschool to the university, from the clinic to the church. Such is the fashion for therapy that it is now offered not only in the psychologist's office---the modern confessional---but on television and radio and... in print. It is the print genre of pop psychology that I explore in this book... Some might ask, Why bother investigating something as vacuous as pop psychology? Its influence is reason enough... It seems to own a share of the best-seller lists and speaks a language all know by heart.
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Format: Hardcover
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."
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