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have all been waiting for: Nehring and his co-authors chart the globalisation
of self-help culture from the US and the UK, to China, Mexico, Trinidad, and
Tobago, capturing the hybridisation of the form and the spread of therapeutic
cultures and neoliberal ideology across the globe. While most studies of self-help
culture to date have focused on the genres prevalence in the Anglophone world,
chiey the US and the UK, Transnational Self-Help reveals just how prevalent
the propaganda of entrepreneurial self-improvement has become. For students
and scholars of popular culture, cultural studies, global studies, psychology and
psychiatry, this is a must read.
Micki McGee, PhD
author, Self-Help, Inc: Makeover Culture in American Life
Associate Professor of Sociology and American Studies,
Fordham University, USA
Over the course of the past several years, scholarly attention to self-help litera-
ture has tied the popularity of this genre to the abstract trajectories of Western
modernising processes. Attending to the existential or ontological shocks of
reexive modernity and the diminishment of social capital, self-help is the band-
aid these societal structures offer to the listless denizens of the Anglosphere.
Transnational Popular Psychology and the Global Self-Help Industry adds valuable
and much-needed perspective to this view through a rich account of the specic
global contexts of self-helps production, distribution and consumption. Through
sustained inquiry and nuanced ethnography, the authors draw out the situated
meanings of self-help within particular national cultures from China, Mexico and
Trinidad to the US and UK, and the varied hybrid and glocal forms such litera-
tures take in these contexts. Both readable and intellectually provocative, this
book captures self-help in its specicity, while drawing it together around more
the practical and situated effects of neoliberalism, and its invocation to personal
enterprise. This book will likely open important new doors not just for scholarly
approaches to self-help, but for more general understandings of globalisation,
neoliberalism and the production of the self.
Sam Binkley, PhD
Associate Professor of Sociology Emerson College, USA
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Transnational Popular
Psychology and the Global
Self-Help Industry
The Politics of Contemporary Social
Change
Daniel Nehring
Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Worcester, UK
Emmanuel Alvarado
Professor of Spanish and Hispanic Studies, Palm Beach State College, USA
Eric C. Hendriks
Postdoctoral Researcher, Peking University, China
Dylan Kerrigan
Lecturer in Anthropology and Political Sociology, The University of the West Indies,
Trinidad and Tobago
palgrave
macmillan
Daniel Nehring, Emmanuel Alvarado, Eric C. Hendriks and
Dylan Kerrigan 2016
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First published 2016 by
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Nehring, Daniel, author.
Transnational popular psychology and the global self-help industry :
the politics of contemporary social change / Daniel Nehring,
Emmanuel Alvarado, Eric C. Hendriks, Dylan Kerrigan.
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Contents
Acknowledgements x
1 Self-Help Worlds 1
How to survive 1
What are self-help books? 6
Exploring self-help 8
Structure of the book 12
3 Self-Helps Transnationalisation 30
Towards a transnational perspective on therapeutic culture 30
Publishing statistics: size and scale 34
Publishing statistics: growth trends and composition 38
A transnational self-help entrepreneur 45
How is self-help transnational? 52
5 Self-Help in Crisis 75
Self-help in an age of diminishing opportunities 75
Feel-good books in an age of crisis: Mainstream self-help
today 79
Self-help dystopias: Opting out and getting by 85
vii
viii Contents
Notes 171
References 174
Index 191
Tables and Figures
Tables
Figures
ix
Acknowledgements
x
About the Authors
xi
1
Self-Help Worlds
How to survive
Bear Grylls has become known around the world as one of the most
recognized faces of survival and outdoor adventure. His journey to
this acclaim started in the UK on the Isle of Wight, where his late
father taught him to climb and sail. Trained from a young age in mar-
tial arts, Bear went on to spend three years as a soldier in the British
Special Forces, serving with 21 SAS. It was here that he perfected
many of the skills that his fans all over the world enjoy watching
him pit against mother-nature. (Grylls, no date-c)
Along these lines, the story continues. A biographical sketch tells readers
of free-fall parachuting accidents in Africa, journeys to remote regions
from Antarctica to the Arctic and mountaineering expeditions to
Mount Everest. It also highlights his high-prole media work for Chan-
nel 4 and Discovery Channel, claiming that the Discovery Channels
Emmy nominated TV show Man Vs. Wild and Born Survivor [. . .] has
become one of the most watched shows on the planet, reaching an
estimated 1.2 billion viewers (Grylls, no date-c). Bear Grylls maintains
his media presence through numerous channels. All of these highlight
his credentials as a tough-as-nails survivalist. His Facebook page (Grylls,
no date-a) shows him on what looks like a mountain top in an adver-
tisement for the NBC television show Running Wild with Bear Grylls.
1
2 Transnational Popular Psychology and the Global Self-Help Industry
YouTube carries videos with titles such as Bear Grylls eats raw snake
(Grylls, 2012a). His online shop, The Ofcial Bear Grylls Store (Grylls,
no date-b), shows an image of the adventurer with raised arms, hold-
ing what looks like an alligator jaw. This online shop sells a broad
range of clothing and hiking gear. Similarly, online shopping malls like
amazon.com offer numerous Bear Grylls-themed items, such as the Bear
Grylls Ultimate Knife, the Bear Grylls Survival Hatchet, and the Ultimate
Bear Grylls Survival Pack with Multitool, Flashlight, and Fire Starter. Grylls
books, moreover, span a variety of genres. There are, for example, his
autobiography, Mud, Sweat and Tears (Grylls, 2011), True Grit (Grylls,
2013), a collection of real-life adventure stories, the exercise manual
Your Life: Train for It (Grylls, 2014), and Mission Survival: Gold of the Gods
(Grylls and Madden, 2008), the rst part of a series of adventure novels
for young adults.
Much of Grylls work explores survivalism in terms of the skills needed
to overcome extreme and hazardous environmental conditions. It is
therefore perhaps unsurprising that, in September 2014, online book-
seller amazon.co.uk listed A Survival Guide for Life (Grylls, 2012b) as the
number two bestseller in the rubric outdoor survival skills. A Survival
Guide for Life, however, marks a noteworthy shift in Grylls work, in
that it sets out survival strategies for dangerous and difcult every-
day situations. The book offers readers a pathway to a successful life,
loosely dened through the metaphor of the dream. The books opening
paragraphs set out the case for dreams:
Dreams are powerful. They are among those precious few intangibles
that have inspired men and women to get up, go to hell and back,
and change the world. [. . .] Our job is to be the dangerous type. The
one who dreams day by day and acts to make those dreams come
alive and actually happen. So take some time to get this right. Go for
a long walk. Think big. Think about what really makes you smile.
Ask yourself what you would do if you didnt need the money. Ask
yourself what really excites you. Ask what would inspire you to keep
going long after most people would quit. (Grylls, 2012b: 1)
The greatest journeys all start with a single step. When you stand at
the bottom of a mountain, you can rarely see a clear route to the
top. It is too far away and the path too twisty and hidden behind
obstacles. The only way to climb the sucker is to start and then keep
putting one foot in front of the other, one step at a time. (Grylls, 2012b: 7;
emphasis in original)
He sets out the values and attitudes that are needed to make it to
the peak in a series of 75 short chapters with titles such as To be
brave, you rst must be afraid, Paddle our own canoe, Failure isnt
failure, and Humility is everything. For instance, under the heading
Cheerfulness in adversity, he invokes his experiences with the Royal
Marine Commandos to remind his readers of the importance of positive
thinking:
Grylls shares his metaphor of the journey and his belief in the
importance of positive thinking with numerous other self-help authors.
In certain ways, there is direct continuity between Grylls prescriptions
for a good life and those of much earlier works. Positive thinking, for
instance, is central to the argument of Norman Vincent Peales classic
and still popular The Power of Positive Thinking (1952/2003). This may
be seen as an illustration of the continuing popularity of self-help texts
and the persistence of well-trodden narrative paths in this genre. This
continuity between self-help texts in the past and in the present is an
important concern for this book, and we will explore it at several points
in the following chapters.
With its survivalist tone and its emphasis on the harsh realities of
life, however, Grylls narrative also differs markedly from those of earlier
4 Transnational Popular Psychology and the Global Self-Help Industry
While Bear Grylls does offer his readers solutions to important life prob-
lems, such easy promises of joy and satisfaction are not to be found in
A Survival Guide to Life. On the one hand, this leaner, darker approach
to self-help writing may be explained through the way in which Grylls
has consistently marketed himself as a tough survivalist with a life full
of extreme, risky and sometimes painful moments. On the other hand,
his book is part of a noteworthy trend in self-help writing in an age of
austerity and diminishing opportunities. In the wake of the 2008 nan-
cial crisis, the subsequent Eurocrisis, and slowing worldwide growth in
the 21st century (Binkley, 2011; Davies, 2015). Instead of promising far-
reaching professional success, easy get-rich-quick schemes, or lasting
love, some self-help bestsellers in recent years have offered strategies
for simply getting by, surviving, or opting out of societys pressures
altogether. Examples of this kind of survivalist self-help include F ck
It Therapy: The Profane Way to Profound Happiness (2012) by John Parkin
and Emergency: This Book Will Save Your Life (2009) by Neil Strauss,
who suddenly turned to survivalism right after having presented him-
self as a dating coach in The Game (2005) and Rules of the Game
(2007).
A Survival Guide for Life might thus be regarded as a fairly typical con-
temporary self-help book. The activities of the books author are less
easily classied, however. Bear Grylls has contributed to a wide variety
of media genres, from adventure shows on TV to young adult novels,
and this makes it difcult to simply describe him as a self-help writer.
However, there are interesting parallels between the form of his pro-
fessional activities and that of many prominent self-help writers. Like
many other authors of bestselling self-help texts, Grylls has strategi-
cally promoted himself through a wide variety of media channels and
Self-Help Worlds 5
Self-help books offer advice and guidance on a very broad range of top-
ics, such as intimate relationships, sexuality, marriage, divorce, friend-
ship, serious illness, weight loss, workplace relationships, professional
success, nancial gain, business management, and the achievement of a
generally happy and fullling life. The narrative form of self-help texts
likewise varies considerably, including, for instance, novels, parables,
autobiographies, science-based narratives, and myths.
Moreover, the boundaries between self-help and other advice genres
in particular philosophical ethics, theological ethics, medical advice,
and how-to guides for narrow practical tasks often blur. One inter-
esting example of self-helps weak delineation as a literary genre can
be found in Tom Wolfes 1998 novel A Man in Full. In Wolfes portrait
of US society in the late 1990s, Conrad Hensley, a young working-class
man who has fallen on hard times, comes across the writings of the
ancient philosopher Epictetus (55135 CE) and begins to rely on Stoic
philosophy to get by. Similarly, the popularity of historical gures such
as Sun Zi, a legendary Chinese general who may have lived in the 6th
century BCE, and Niccol Machiavelli, an Italian politician and philoso-
pher whose work spanned the late 15th and early 16th century, has
arguably been amplied recently because they have come to provide the
basis for self-help books such as Dial M for Machiavelli: Machiavellian
Metaphors for Managers (Attar, 2013), The New Machiavelli: Renaissance
Realpolitik for Modern Managers (McAlpine, 1997), and Sun Tzu The Art of
War for Executives (Krause, 1996).
Given this ease with which self-help appropriates subject matters,
narrative forms and disparate literary sources, it is useful to begin our
discussion with a brief characterisation of the genre. A common and
dening feature of self-help texts is that they propose a careful and
systematic self-examination of certain aspects of readers conduct in
everyday life. Consider the following paragraphs from American pastor
Joel Osteens Become a Better You:
These sentences are taken from the opening pages of a chapter titled
Have Condence in Yourself. Osteen here asks his readers to scrutinise
their internal conversation for negative self-talk. The purpose of such
self-scrutiny is to enable readers to diagnose their condition, such as
thinking negative thoughts, and to adopt new forms of conduct in
order to achieve greater success in specic arenas of their lives.
In this sense, self-help books like Become a Better You propose tech-
niques for self-control, such as constant self-scrutiny for negative
thoughts. In turn, successful self-control may enable readers to gain
a sense of self-actualisation, that is to say achievement and personal
fullment to the fullest of their potential. Thus, Osteen explains that he
would like his readers to talk to themselves with empowering, afrming
thoughts and avoid the negative mode of thought that keeps millions
of people from rising higher. Self-help texts therefore have clear and
explicitly stated didactical objectives, and they articulate specic sets of
social norms and beliefs about the nature of social life and the relation-
ship between individual and society. With his call for positive thinking,
for example, Joel Osteen draws on a much-discussed trope in US pop-
ular culture (Ehrenreich, 2009). His declaration that negative self-talk
keeps millions of people from rising higher articulates the belief that it
is individuals attitudes that determine their chances for upward social
mobility, rather than the social-structural constraints of economy, pol-
itics and culture. If this belief is accepted, pushing oneself to maintain
a consistently positive attitude might indeed lead to self-actualisation,
and it becomes sensible to turn positive thinking into a behavioural
norm.
This suggests that self-help books are never just concerned with advis-
ing individual readers on how to improve their lives. In order for
their advice to become meaningful and turn into behavioural norms,
they also have to promote and convince their readers of particular
8 Transnational Popular Psychology and the Global Self-Help Industry
beliefs about the social world. This gives self-help an important political
dimension that will concern us later in this book.
Exploring self-help
After setting out the conceptual basis of our argument in Chapters 2 and
3, we look at the transnational production, circulation and consump-
tion of self-help books through ve case studies: the Peoples Republic of
China (Chapter 4), the UK and the US (Chapter 5), Mexico (Chapter 6),
and Trinidad and Tobago (Chapter 7). These case studies cover four con-
tinents and the worlds three largest language zones: Mandarin, Spanish
and English. Chapters 3 and 4 analyse the production and circulation
of self-help texts and make a case for a transnational perspective on
self-help culture. Chapters 5 and 6 consider narratives of the self and
social relationships in self-help books. Finally, Chapter 7 explores the
ways in which readers draw on self-help narratives to account for their
experiences and practices in everyday life.
Chapter 2 develops a conceptual framework for our analysis of self-
help culture. It situates self-help in broader academic debates about
therapeutic culture, mental health and transformations of self in late
modernity. We rst situate the history of self-help culture in sociolog-
ical debates about processes of modernisation and the rationalisation
of social life. Looking at early self-help authors, such as Samuel Smiles,
Napoleon Hill and Dale Carnegie, we argue that self-help has from its
beginnings espoused liberal ideals of selfhood and agency. Against this
backdrop, we then explore questions about contemporary self-help as
source of empowerment and social control under neoliberal capital-
ism. Some recent studies have drawn attention to self-helps capacity
to empower through directed individual and collective action (Wright,
2008, 2010). However, the genre has more commonly been criticised
for promoting individualism and the privatisation of political concerns.
These critiques highlight self-helps ties to neoliberal understandings of
self and social relationships. While these assessments have problema-
tised self-help in important ways, they fail to reect the diversity and
hybridity the genre has acquired in the context of its transnational
spread. We explain self-helps transnationalisation through the glob-
alisation of Western understandings of mental health and the institu-
tions of psychiatry and psychotherapy. While this has sometimes been
described as a process of cultural standardisation, we draw attention to
the diverse, hybrid modes of experience and practice that have resulted
from the globalisation of therapeutic culture.
Chapter 3 then explores self-help writing and publishing from a
transnational perspective. We conceptualise the geographical ows
of discourses transported by self-help books as multidirectional and
Self-Help Worlds 13
that has affected both countries since 2008 has tempered self-helps
characteristic promise that profound and lasting self-improvement can
be achieved as a result of well-considered, decisive individual actions.
In this context, we examine to what extent the writings of mainstream
self-help authors on topics such as personal nance and career develop-
ment have changed in the wake of the crisis and with austerity. We also
look at niches of self-help writing and explore the narratives of evan-
gelical Christian self-help in the US and survivalist self-help texts that
emphasise the need to cope with the challenges of everyday life over
far-reaching success. Even though these niches highlight the diversity of
self-help writing in both countries, neoliberal understandings of self and
social relationships cut across the work of both American and British
authors. Contemporary self-help is rooted in models of autonomous
self-making that highlight the capacity of individuals to transform
their life through introspection and well-reasoned choices that result
from it.
Our analysis of self-help in Mexico (chapter 6) uncovers transnational
cultural ows from a position outside the dominant Anglosphere. Our
focus on Mexico sheds light on the self-help publications in the largest
Spanish-speaking economy in Latin America. In particular, this chapter
centres on Mexican self-help narratives about intimate and personal
relationships written by Mexican authors in the past two decades. This
allows us, rst, to gain insight into the interaction between cultural
imports from the US and the UK, on the one hand, and native self-
help narratives responding to problems of self-development in Latin
American societies, on the other. Second, it allows us to analysis
transnational cultural ows beyond, and outside, the dominant cul-
tural ows from the Anglosphere to the rest of the world. Illustratively,
Latin American self-help authors such as Carlos Cuauhtmoc Snchez
and Don Miguel Ruiz have become popular both in the transnational
Spanish domain and in Anglophone countries such as the UK and
the US. Hence, they embody the multidirectionality of self-help as a
transnational network.
Finally, our exploration of self-help books and their readers in
Trinidad and Tobago is intended to shed light on the relationship
between self-help narratives and their consumers. Extant research tends
to treat as discrete issues the ways in which self-help narratives construct
models for life improvement (e.g. Hazleden, 2003, 2010) and the ways
in which readers understand and use these models in everyday life (e.g.
Lichterman, 1992; Simonds, 1992). Here, we seek to bridge this gap by
exploring the ways in which readers relate to transnationally mobile
Self-Help Worlds 15
Here, right at the outset of her argument, Jeffers makes several moves
that are typical of many self-help authors. First, she sets up a problem
fear as endemic and requiring an urgent response. Then she goes on
to direct her readers to insights and tools that will vastly improve
their ability to manage any situation they might face. By highlighting a
source of crisis and simultaneously offering guidance that will empower
her readers to fundamentally improve their lives, Jeffers in fact spells
out the promise of the self-help genre as a whole.
The model for self-transformation Jeffers proposes throughout Feel
the Fear . . . and Do it Anyway is likewise typical of contemporary self-
help writing. She offers a highly individualistic account of personal
transformation that relies on her readers ability to understand the
sources of their fear and overcome it through well-reasoned choices.
17
18 Transnational Popular Psychology and the Global Self-Help Industry
did not maintain that love and a relationship should be a womans pri-
mary aspiration, instead arguing that women had to learn to stand on
their own two feet and be self-determining (Hayman, 2012).
More broadly, self-help matters precisely because of its strong presence
in the public sphere and in the personal lives of its many readers. The
success of Susan Jeffers mirrors that of numerous other self-help authors.
Since its beginnings in the early 20th century, self-help has turned into
a massive industry at the international level. Beyond books, self-help
today is available in a variety of forms, from self-help entrepreneurs
appearances on TV and in public events to self-help magazines and web-
sites (see Chapters 3 and 4). As a popular, widely consumed form of life
advice, self-help both expresses and constructs norms of conduct and
cultural meanings of self-identity and social relationships.
From this perspective, self-help becomes a signicant topic of socio-
logical enquiry in three ways. First, self-help narratives offer a window
into transformations of self-identity and social relationships in the
context of processes of capitalist modernisation. The study of these
transformations has arguably been foundational to sociological enquiry,
and self-help is often seen as a source of relevant insights (e.g. McGee,
2005). Second, self-help culture has frequently been explored in the
context of sociological concerns with the cultural consequences of capi-
talism. In this context, self-help is considered as an emblematic element
of an increasing individualisation, commercialisation and commodica-
tion of self, emotions and personal ties (e.g. Crawford, 2004; Gershon,
2011; Hochschild, 2003). Finally, self-help speaks to a longstanding
interest among sociologists and anthropologists in the globalisation
of cultural forms and practices (e.g. Appadurai, 1996; Hannerz, 1996;
Nederveen Pieterse, 2009). While most research on self-help has focused
narrowly on the Global Northwest, a small but growing number of
studies have begun to draw attention to the international spread of self-
helps therapeutic narratives of self and self-improvement (e.g. Choon,
2008; Hendriks, 2012; Nehring, 2009a, 2009b; Ubirajara Sobral, 2006;
Yamada, 2009). This development can be understood against the back-
drop of the globalisation of Western cultural models of mental health.
On the one hand, this has entailed the global diffusion of psychiatry
and psychotherapy as institutions that address concerns about mental
health (Fernando, 2014; Mills, 2014). On the other hand, psychother-
apeutic understandings of self-identity and social relationships have
blended into popular culture and shape understandings and practices
in everyday life, as well as in a variety of institutional realms, from
business to politics. We will consider each of these perspectives and
20 Transnational Popular Psychology and the Global Self-Help Industry
Self-made men
Do you know someone you would like to change and regulate and
improve? Good! That is ne. I am all in favor of it, but why not
begin on yourself? From a purely selsh standpoint, that is a lot
24 Transnational Popular Psychology and the Global Self-Help Industry
more protable than trying to improve others yes, and a lot less
dangerous. Dont complain about the snow on your neighbors roof,
said Confucius, when your own doorstep is unclean. (Carnegie,
1936/1981: 15)
30
Self-Helps Transnationalisation 31
Perhaps one of the most glaring omissions from the self-help book
canon has been the absence of globalization, either as a theorizing
construct or operational framework against which we could chart,
plot and measure the breadth and width of contemporary self-help
book culture. (Neville, 2012: 372)
three hundred, and Illouz soon returns to her primary concern with
therapeutic culture in the US. Furthermore, while she argues that ther-
apeutic culture has become a global phenomenon, she draws on a
curiously limited conception of globalisation, which simply assumes the
transnational diffusion of cultural models and a concomitant process of
socio-cultural standardisation:
In a series of articles, John Meyer and his associates have argued that
globalization is the process by which an increasing number of states
worldwide adopt the same cultural models (of the economy, the
polity, the individual), thus making these models penetrate social life.
[. . .] In the modern globalized polity, individuals constitute them-
selves by using standard rules in order to establish the essence of
modern actorhood, such as being rational and purposeful. Psychol-
ogy is one of the main cores of cultural globalization, a source of
models around which individuality gets organized worldwide. This
model is diffused worldwide through university curriculum and train-
ing, through the regulated practice of professional therapy, through
the state adoption of therapeutic modes of intervention in society,
and through the more informal structures of the market. (Illouz,
2008: 217)
narratives that have emerged in other societies, both within and beyond
the Global Northwest.
It is misleading to understand therapeutic culture as particular to the
Global Northwest and rooted in cultural and socio-economic develop-
ments specic to certain Western national societies. First, this view fails
to acknowledge the deep roots which therapeutic culture has taken
in other parts of the world. Second, it overlooks the ways in which
therapeutic narratives of self and social relationships, the material prod-
ucts in which these narratives are embodied, and the individuals and
organisations that promote these narratives operate across, beyond and,
sometimes, regardless of the boundaries of national societies.
Countering the overly narrow perspective dominating present schol-
arship, we will portray self-help as a multidirectional transnational
network, centred on the US but thoroughly heterogeneous and hybrid
in character nonetheless. More broadly, we seek to move the academic
discussion about therapeutic culture at large towards an appreciation of,
simultaneously, the transnational scope of contemporary discourses of
self and social relationships and their roots in, and interaction with,
locally specic social structures. The transnational spread of therapy
culture and self-help is marked by glocalisation. The term glocalisa-
tion, commonly associated with British sociologist Ronald Robertson,
is a portmanteau of global and local (Robertson, 1992, 1997). It signi-
es the merging of global and local cultural forms as globalising cultural
forms descend upon different polities, societies and cultures, setting in
motion dynamics of appropriation, hybridisation and competition. As a
mode of globalisation or transnationalisation, glocalisation contrasts
with straightforward cultural homogenisation and standardisation.
Our arguments about self-helps transnationalisation do not amount
to empirical generalisations about the genre. It is not our aim to develop
an empirically generalisable account of transnational self-help pub-
lishing. Rather, through a set of exploratory case studies, we set out
conceptual tools that may serve as a base for further debate about the
transnational scope of self-help and therapeutic culture. The chapters
subject matter signicant to the broader concerns set out above in so far
as charting the circulation local, regional, transnational of cultural
objects in this case self-help books may generate insights into the
geographical ows of the narratives transported by these objects. In this
sense, the present chapter is foundational to the project of establishing
self-help as a transnationally networked cultural phenomenon.
Our exploration of transnational self-help culture begins with a sur-
vey of publication statistics recorded by national and international
34 Transnational Popular Psychology and the Global Self-Help Industry
of around 10.5 billion dollars, while the self-help book market reached
a worth of 406 million dollars (Marketdata Enterprises, 2010: 2). Both
numbers should, however, only be taken as rough estimates of the self-
help markets size, because the reports categorisations are imprecise. For
instance, they include 2.2 billion dollars worth of medical weight loss
programmes (which seems an over-extensive denition of self-help),
but exclude the revenues from public events of self-help entrepreneurs
(which is a paradigmatic element of the self-help industry and, accord-
ing to the reports own admission, worth more than $1 billion per
year). The report, moreover, only covers the US. Similarly, holistic statis-
tics about the self-help market as a whole are not, to our knowledge,
available for any other country.
Furthermore, the size of the different national markets for self-help
books is also hard to determine, as the statistics offered by publish-
ing houses, national publishing associations and market research rms
systematically underestimate the size of self-help book markets. This is
because they draw on the self-denition by self-help authors and pub-
lishers: whichever book title is self-labelled as self-help, gets put in
the self-help category. The problem with this method is that due to
rhetorical, strategic and commercial reasons, many, if not most, self-help
titles are marketed as something other than self-help (e.g. as spiri-
tuality, theology, philosophy, science, literature, business handbooks).
Correspondingly, most self-help entrepreneurs do not call themselves
by that name, but rather use a variety of other self-labels, from the sim-
ple author to the more slippery psychologist or philosopher. As a
result, as British journalist Viv Groskop observes, self-help authors and
titles have surreptitiously conquered bestseller rankings without fully
showing up in the statistics:
Self-help books are a magnet for people who are looking to raise
their self-esteem, nd the key to success and obtain the formula
for resolving their existential problems. And they represent a very
attractive market, asserts Rigo Garca, the head of marketing at Edi-
torial Pax Mxico. [. . .] The national publishing industry is going
through a severe crisis. According to the Report on Editorial Activity
in Mexico 2009, the production of books fell by 17.27%. In this year,
66 million copies less were produced than in 2008, when the total
reached 385 million copies. In the CANIEMs thematic category Phi-
losophy and Psychology, self-help books, both in 2008 and 2009 made
rst place, selling the largest variety of titles and the largest number
of copies and contributing 60% to billing in this thematic category.
(Crow, 2005)
We will now move from the size of self-help markets to their composi-
tion and growth in the past few years. The tables in this section are based
on the self-categorisations of publishers and authors themselves. In spite
of their limitations, they do offer rough indications of growth trends
and the composition (foreign versus native self-help titles) of national
self-help book markets.
In Mexico, between 2005 and 2011, the annual sales of self-help books
remained more or less stable, with more than 3.5 million books sold
every year (Table 3.1). Figures on the production of new self-help titles
in Mexico likewise suggest the market for these books is consistently
strong. While there has been a notable decrease since the onset of the
crisis of the publishing industry, hundreds of new self-help titles were
consistently produced every year in Mexico between 2005 and 2010,
and millions of new self-help books were printed (Table 3.2).
Recent research implies that self-help is likewise prevalent in the
book markets of other Spanish-speaking countries.2 Vanina Papalini
Self-Helps Transnationalisation 39
Source: National Chamber of the Publishing Industry of Mexico (CANIEM), personal corre-
spondence; sales values converted from Mexican pesos and rounded up.
(2010: 453) estimates that self-help books belong to the most frequently
sold genres in Argentina, Colombia and Spain, with their share of the
book market in 2009 consistently surpassing 10 per cent. According to
ofcial data on the editorial industry in Argentina, between 3.5 and
5 per cent of new titles produced by local publishers between 2009 and
2011 were self-help books (Direccin General de Estadstica y Censos,
2010a: 8; 2010b: 8; 2011: 9; 2012: 8).
40 Transnational Popular Psychology and the Global Self-Help Industry
2007 $10,974,528
7,340,000 approx.
2008 $13,451,439
9,000,000 approx.
2009 $10,816,539
7,234,000 approx.
2010 $9,829,242
6,574,000 approx.
2011 $9,308,077
6,225,000 approx.
The economic recession triggered off by the nancial crisis in 2008 hit
the publishing industry hard, especially in the United States. Begin-
ning in August 2008 and accelerating through September and Octo-
ber, most trade publishers in the US experienced a sharp downturn
in sales. [. . .] With lower sales and higher returns, trade publishers
were not just earning less; they were also facing higher write-offs
for unearned advances and higher provisions for returns. And if any
retailers or wholesalers went out of business along the way some
have already and more could if the recession continues to bite: pub-
lishers live in constant fear of Borders going under they would face
further substantial write-offs for bad debts that could obliterate any
prot that remains. Similar trends, less dramatic were evident in the
UK (and Borders in the UK did, in fact, go under [. . .]). (Thompson,
2010: 395)
Thompson here sets out the scenario in whose context the statistics in
this chapter might be understood. While other factors apart from the
overall crisis of the publishing industry might have contributed to read-
ers declining interest in self-help books, it is at least conceivable that
this trend may to a large degree be attributed to an overall decline in
the sales of printed books.
Next, compared to Britain, the numbers for self-help book sales in
India and South Africa are more stable, yet also signicantly lower
(Tables 3.5 and 3.6). With the current limited data, it remains unclear
whether this shows that the latter markets are really signicantly smaller
or that the difference with the UK is explained by differences in the
categorisation practices of publishers, authors and booksellers.
More than statistics on the overall size of self-help markets, bestseller
lists offer insights into transnational cultural ows, specically the pop-
ularity of certain self-help authors across borders, the proportion of for-
eign imports versus bestsellers by native authors, and the international
popularity of American authors.
42 Transnational Popular Psychology and the Global Self-Help Industry
Tables 3.7 and 3.8 show how two authors from the US have achieved
international popularity. Napoleon Hill (18831970) was one of the
earliest self-help authors and entrepreneurs in the US. Think and Grow
Rich (1937) is one of the dening works of Hills career. As Table 3.7
shows, the book is still widely read today, achieving bestseller status in
the US, as well as India and South Africa.
Self-Helps Transnationalisation 43
Table 3.7 Bestseller rankings of Napoleon Hills Think and Grow Rich
Table 3.8 Bestseller rankings of Stephen Coveys The 7 Habits of Highly Effective
People
Hill, Stephen Covey, Spencer Johnson and Susan Jeffers have devel-
oped a language of self-improvement that speaks to readers well beyond
the borders of the US, while proting from the gigantic reach of
Anglosphere publishers and culture industries.
Figure 3.1 shows that such internationally successful American self-
help authors are not exceptions, but rather belong to a pronounced
systematic feature of international self-help. American authors wrote a
very substantial proportion of the top self-help bestsellers in the US, the
UK, India, South Africa, Germany and even China, demonstrating the
dominant nodal role of American self-help in the international self-help
industry.
Although US self-help thus has a visibly inuential position in
the transnational self-help universe, this does not imply that the
transnationalisation of self-help is mono-directional. If anything, closer
inspection of the bestseller lists suggests that self-help is a multidirec-
tional, glocalising transnational network. Indian bestseller lists feature
a prominent number of Indian authors, and works by South African
authors are consistently present on South African bestseller lists. In the
UK, British authors dominate the rankings, often with self-improvement
Self-Helps Transnationalisation 45
you. Its time to write the next chapters in your life, Marquez says.
Well show you how. Inicia Tu Exito takes place from 9 a.m. to 5
p.m., June 19, at the Long Beach Convention Center in Long Beach,
Calif. (Newswire, 2011)
This is just a short extract from a long account spanning several pages.
Efrn is shocked, and his moral understanding of sex begins to change
as a result, setting off a process of profound self-transformation, from
a confused drifter into a young man who, at the storys end, is deeply
committed to his family and his newly found ance.
Carlos Cuauhtmoc Snchez thus writes narratives of moral redemp-
tion, whose protagonists discover moral truths, be it about sex and
intimacy or about economic success. At the same time, his recipes
for self-transformation have a strong voluntaristic dimension (Nehring,
2009b). In his narratives, improvement of ones self, ones relation-
ships with others and ones place in life are ultimately self-motivated
and grounded in ones capacity for introspection and concomitant
behavioural modication. For instance, having watched large parts of
The Silent Scream, Efrn comes to his own, deeply felt conclusions about
the wrongs of abortions:
I could not bear it any longer. I turned off the TV, feeling great
confusion. How could I have supported something like this for so
Self-Helps Transnationalisation 51
long? I did not have the least doubt that the origin of all of mans
sin lies in ignorance. Even the abortion doctors themselves do their
work blindfolded, smelling the delicious aroma of money. But man
is not bad when he knows. He is bad out of ignorance. I felt a strong
urge to crawl between my bedsheets and cry. (Cuauhtmoc Snchez,
1994: 37)
54
Self-Help Entrepreneurs in China 55
The Jews are the richest people in the world, and they are known
across the world as the wisest people. Relating to the wealth of the
Jews, there is a classical saying: The money of the world is in the
Americans pockets, but the money of the Americans is in the pockets
of the Jews.
, ,
: ,
(Publishers statement on the cover of Lapin, 2009)
No matter how absurd, even offensive, such ideas and slogans may
seem to contemporary Westerners familiar with the legacy of European
anti-Semitism, they reect the cultural hybridity and heterogeneity of
Chinese self-help. Operating in, and responding to, a competitive mar-
ket environment, the Chinese self-help eld consists of a unique, glocal
mixture of cultural imports and Chinese adaptions. These Chinese
adaptations hybridise American self-help and Chinas native religio-
philosophical traditions; globalised psychological discourse and old
superstitions; neoliberal individualism and new-style CCP propaganda
in surprising, original and sometimes deeply opportunistic ways. In this
glocal form, self-help entrepreneurs, discourses, teachings and products
have obtained a broad public and cultural outreach in contemporary
China.
First there is self-helps extension into the media eld; more specif-
ically, into journalism and celebrity culture. Examples of prominent
journalists who turned to teaching self-help on the side are Bai Yansong
and Wang Fang. In 2010, Bai, a famous CCTV news anchor and the
producer of various documentaries, wrote the book Are You Happy? The
book, which became a major bestseller, is autobiographical, telling how
Bai overcame a sad phase in his own life. However, it also wants to pro-
vide the reader with advice on how to nd happiness in our age (Bai,
2011). Wang, a long-time television talk show host on Beijing TV, in
extension of her therapeutic, Oprah-like talk shows, wrote a self-help
book about the challenges of romantic relationships titled Im Loves
Advocate. What players such as Bai and Wang have in common is they
draw on their previously acquired media prominence to quickly launch
their careers in self-help on the side, selling self-help books while
continuing their main occupation in television journalism.
In addition, there is an inuential class of celebrity businessmen who
have gained prominence in the self-help eld. Their biographical eld
trajectory runs from business to the mass media to self-help: their initial
success in business allowed them to establish themselves as celebrities
in the mass media, which, in turn, allowed them to rapidly invade the
self-help eld and establish themselves as self-help entrepreneurs in the
career advice segment. These players blur the boundaries between self-
help and the media (and business) by employing their media capital
inside the self-help eld.
Prominent examples of these types of players in Chinese self-help are
Ma Yun, Li Yanhong and Li Kaifu. All three derive from Chinas vogu-
ish IT branch. Ma Yun is the self-made founder and CEO of the Alibaba
Group which employs about 22,000 people worldwide. His bestselling
self-help book Ma Yuns Comments on Starting a Business ( ),
which was connected to a television programme in which he also
appeared, provides advice to young, aspiring entrepreneurs. Li Yanhong
is the co-founder of Baidu, Chinas most popular search engine. He
teaches on what he calls the 29 principles of Baidu, a set of princi-
ples meant to further ones success in business and life. Li Kaifu, who
held top management positions at Google, Microsoft and Apple, has
authored numerous self-help titles and has, for over a decade, been
active on the Chinese mainland as a self-help entrepreneur specialised
in career planning.
All the above examples feature players with substantial media capital
moving from the mass media eld into the eld of self-help. How-
ever, there is also movement in the opposite direction: in those cases,
68 Transnational Popular Psychology and the Global Self-Help Industry
the same life-advice market as the products and teachers of the self-help
movement. As a result, the relationship between Chinese medicine and
Western-style, health-related self-help is highly complex. (Adding to
the complexity is the fact that some conceptions from Chinese medicine
had already inuenced some of Western self-help to begin with.)
What Ma Yueling is for Chinese medicine, Yu Dan is for Chinese
philosophy. Yu Dan, an associate professor in media studies at Beijing
Normal University, gained tremendous prominence in her role as pop-
ular interpreter of classical Chinese philosophers. This prominence,
rst conned to China, eventually also extended internationally as her
bestseller on Confucius was translated into English and then also other
languages, attracting critical scrutiny in Western media (Sun, 2009 and
others). Though at least the Chinese media tend to celebrate her as a
philosopher, or as someone making a serious contribution to the public
dissemination of philosophical knowledge, intellectuals and academic
philosophers tend not to recognise her at all. Confucius must be turning
in his grave, writes Confucian philosopher Daniel A. Bell, who teaches
philosophy at the prestigious Tsinghua University in Beijing (Bell, 2008:
174). Above we saw how more politically minded intellectuals such as
Liu Xiaobo reach a similar, equally damning conclusion.
Their heteronomous status as commerce-oriented life teachers mov-
ing in-between popular self-help and more formal institutions and
elds of knowledge, almost automatically renders gures such as Yu
Dan, Zeng Guoping and Ma Yueling controversial among intellectuals
(though the controversy surrounding Ma is also due to her predilection
for old-fashioned quackery). It should be said, however, that self-helps
detractors are mostly politically uninuential (on 13 April 2010, twenty
scholars demonstratively burned self-help books at the South China
University of Technology to signal their desperation). The party-state,
by contrast, is a great friend of the thoroughly liberal-bourgeois self-
help movement, no matter the Partys socialist pretensions. Besides
allowing self-help entrepreneurs onto Chinas central media platforms,
it also indirectly furthers self-helps public prominence by suppressing
much of self-helps would-be public competition from institutionalised
religion.
The tacit political support, in combination with a swelling capital-
ist media market, has enabled self-help to obtain such an extensive
outreach in Chinese society, culture and public life. Exactly due to
its extensiveness, however, it is only weakly delineated from adjacent
socio-cultural elds and Chinas broader structural transformations. Self-
help gradually shades into Chinese medicine, pop psychology and pop
72 Transnational Popular Psychology and the Global Self-Help Industry
75
76 Transnational Popular Psychology and the Global Self-Help Industry
Table 5.1 Annual sales of self-help books by Paul McKenna, 2006 and 2012
2014
You hold in your hands a book that has the power to change your life
forever.
Self-Help in Crisis 77
austerity that began in 2008 has had little impact on one of Britains
most successful mainstream self-help authors. Over the last four years,
his books have been as popular as they were before the crisis, while the
models of self-help they advocate have not changed signicantly.
Does this mean the great crisis that began in 2008 has had little impact
on self-help writing at large? This is the central question we pursue
in this chapter, looking at self-help narratives in the UK and the US.
Both societies have been at the forefront of political experiments with
neoliberalism, resulting in economic deregulation, the privatisation of
key institutions, a decline of welfare state provisions, a marked growth
in corporate power, and a notable reduction in the scope and effec-
tiveness of democratic politics (Crouch, 2004; Daguerre, 2013; Dean,
2009; Harvey, 2007a). In both countries, the socio-economic crisis that
began in 2008, as a result of neoliberal economic policies, has entailed
widening socio-economic inequalities and a growing sense of social
polarisation, injustice and diminishing opportunities for upward social
mobility (Dufour and Orhangazi, 2014; Gilligan, 2012; Harrison, 2012).
At the same time, neoliberalism as a cultural, political and economic
system seems to have survived the crisis largely intact (Crouch, 2011;
Dowling and Harvie, 2014; Mirowski, 2013; Small, 2011; Urry, 2014).
How, if at all, have self-help writers in the UK and the US responded to
this deep malaise? Does self-helps classic promise that a better life can
be achieved in little time still hold sway? In this sense, is Paul McKennas
work still typical of the self-help genre at large, or are his recipes for a
changed life in seven days the exception to new norms in self-help writ-
ing? To answer these questions, we now survey some recent trends in
self-help writing in the US and the UK.
Dene your values. Your values can and should be a very important
part of your personal brand. Having a set of values you dene and
live by can help you make the right decisions for your branding no
matter what choices you have to make. These values are the princi-
ples by which you live, and by which people will view your brand.
[. . .] Your values need to align with your brand, your work, and your
life in order for you to be happy. [. . .] It is about understanding and
bettering the type of person you are. (Cijo, 2014: Ch. 5)
At the same time, though, there are both in the UK and in the US niches
of self-help writing that have responded to the crisis in notably different
ways. Since the beginnings of the great crisis in 2008, one notable trend
in self-help writing in both the UK and the US has been a growth in the
number of survivalist self-help books. These books are distinguished,
rst, by a strong emphasis on the stress, anxiety and the risks of every-
day life, and second, by their focus on the practical skills and attitudes
their readers need to either cope with these risks or begin a new life
altogether. Survivalist self-help books offer dystopian visions of societies
that offer few opportunities for self-fullment. There are a few early,
pre-crisis examples of this form of self-help. For example, in Getting Out
from Under, Stephanie Winston emphasises the constant overwhelming
nature of contemporary life:
Those same people for whom gaining control over their papers and
their closets was enough ten or fteen years ago now nd that their
crisis of time is not simply solved by getting more organized. The
clutter they experience is as much internal as external the result
of having too many conicting choices, a growing list of priorities
to shufe in the same time frame, and a burgeoning afiction of
guilt and disappointment at not being able to handle everything per-
fectly. [. . .] The birth of new possibilities has given rise to the birth
of new shoulds, doubling the intensity of already crowded lives.
These shoulds are reinforced by an ever-widening cadre of experts
discoursing in every public medium about what it means to be a
good parent, a productive employee, an appealing personality [. . .]
and still have time to plant petunias. (Winston, 1999: 1f.; emphasis
in original)
The world with which you are probably most familiar is not your
original world. Your origins are in a far kinder, gentler place a place
of ease, fullment, and joy. [. . .] Your current tumultuous reality may
be fascinating, but it is not your true home. [. . .] Its time to redis-
cover Easy World, the reality of your origins the state of being in
which you dont simply survive, you thrive. Its time to come home
to the reality in which you are fully supported in being your Self and
doing what is in alignment with your hearts desire. [. . .] Its time to
remember that being in Easy World is a decision you can make at any
time, and that if you decide to revisit Difcult World, you recognize
that its a choice, not a necessity. (Hamrick, 2010: Ch. 1; emphasis in
original)
Implicit in these statements are assumptions about the self and self-
improvement that arguably characterise the mindfulness model as a
whole. Negative feelings are portrayed as a mental and emotional, rather
than a social, condition. In this sense, they are internal to the individual
and can be addressed through a shift in perspective, described here as
shifting into Being mode and the happiness and contentment that fol-
low from it. Williams and Penman therefore encourage their readers to
Self-Help in Crisis 89
Like dogs on heat, trying to shag the legs of human strangers, lamp-
posts, re hydrants, benches, and occasionally cats, we try to shag
meaning out of anything that will have us. We are on-heat meaning
machines, desperately trying to nd meaning: in the pointless work
we do; the fruitless relationships we have; the interminable stuff we
accumulate (which we carry slowly from store to dump); the gods we
invent; the rules of conduct we imagine and enforce; characters we
dream up for ourselves; stories we tell . . . And on and on until we die,
when we go . . . nowhere, and certainly not to nally see the point,
because it wasnt there in the rst place. (Parkin, 2012: Part 1)
in the end. In his own words, the search for meaning, which most of us
are on, is a pretty potty affair (Parkin, 2012: Part 1).
From this diagnosis of the contemporary condition, Parkin develops
a surprisingly simple recipe for a fullling life. On the one hand, he
advises his readers to take the chill pill, and slow it all down, give up a
few things, do less, under-perform, trust it will work out, [. . .] and gen-
erally enjoy life more (Parkin, 2012: Part 5). On the other hand, he
suggests it is important to pursue ones dreams: If you love it, please
go and do it. If you hate something in your life, please go and change
it (Parkin, 2012: Part 5). Combining these two attitudes will enable his
readers to discover a state of freedom from concerns about issues like
money, careers and relationships, and enjoy a state of gradual, unfo-
cused and creative self-discovery. Obstacles to the success of this recipe,
Parkin argues, lie mainly in a range of problematic emotions and atti-
tudes, such as fear, self-doubt and perfectionism. Much of the book is
taken up with a critique of these emotions and attitudes and advice on
how to leave them behind.
At rst glance, survivalist self-help books thus differ notably from clas-
sic texts by authors like Dale Carnegie and Napoleon Hill. Survivalist
authors like Hamrick, Parkin and Bear Grylls (see Chapter 1) have
largely abandoned the promises of material success that characterise
the classic texts. Instead, they combine the assumption that contem-
porary societies are characterised by adversity with calls for spiritual
growth, on the platform of a post-materialist, inward-looking orien-
tation to everyday life. While Parkins colloquial style is notably dif-
ferent from the other texts we have examined so far, he shares with
their authors a concern about spiritual survival and wellbeing under
dystopian social conditions that offer little beyond stress, panic and
futile attachments. Self-help books such as Parkins, Hamricks and
Nashs frame self-improvement as a journey of spiritual self-discovery
that is enabled by withdrawal from complex or threatening life situ-
ations. Even though these books typically do not make reference to
specic religious, spiritual or philosophical traditions, they share the
assumption that partial or full withdrawal from everyday challenges is
the path to a better life.
However, these books do share classic self-helps strong voluntaris-
tic bent. They typically claim opting out is a matter of autonomous
personal choice, and they do not explore in any detail the condi-
tions, economic, political, emotional and otherwise, under which these
choices must be made. Thus, for instance, when John Parkin (2012)
asks his readers to f k it, he seems to do so on the basis of the
Self-Help in Crisis 91
implicit assumption that his readers will have the nancial resources,
professional skills, and personal and professional relationships to both
let go and pursue their dreams. Parkin attributes personal troubles his
readers may face to a misguided outlook on life, using the metaphor
of the prison. Changing this outlook requires a process of systematic
introspection and the mental disposition to change, for which his books
and workshops provide the tools. His model of self-improvement there-
fore does not differ fundamentally from those developed by pre-crisis
self-help entrepreneurs. The same conclusion applies to survivalist nar-
ratives by other authors. In spite of their distinctive style, survivalist
narratives offer classic recipes for self-improvement that emphasise
autonomous individual choices as the source of spiritual growth and
fullment.
My message is simple. Life is not fair. You will have to overcome odds
that may be stacked against you. But you can change the outcome
of your life if you will refuse to give up hope and each day rene
your vision of who you really are [. . .] the key is that you do not
allow others perceptions and probabilities to dene and decide your
destiny. You are the only one who controls the ultimate odds against
your own likelihood of success. (Jakes, 2008: 58ff.)
Here Jakes assures his readers that in spite of systemic social problems
which may impact the life chances of certain segments of the American
Self-Help in Crisis 93
If you are to reposition yourself for success, my friend, you must seek
out the options that are most conducive to your ultimate goals. But
you must also give yourself permission to close doors behind you
[. . .] to say no to good opportunities if theyre not advancing you
strategically toward the large goals youve established for yourself.
(Jakes, 2008: 87)
Johnson Sirleaf, and Apple Inc. which have, according to Jakes, intelli-
gently repositioned themselves to changing life or market conditions in
order to achieve success. However, in addition to these, Jakes weaves in
his personal life experience as a prime example of his message. Through-
out the book Jakes presents himself not only as a modern spiritual leader
but as a minister with entrepreneurial insight and accomplishment. The
foreword to Reposition Yourself, written by TV personality and Christian
self-help author Dr Phil McGraw, describes the way T. D. Jakes has been
able to wisely reect upon and enact the necessary life shifts required to
rise from his humble beginnings as a teenager taking care of his invalid
father through modest jobs in local industries. Today, T. D. Jakes is a
prominent pastor of a megachurch with approximately 30,000 members
whose sermons are regularly broadcast through Black Entertainment
Television and the Trinity Broadcasting Network, among other popu-
lar American networks. Jakes credits his own success to a combination
of Gods blessings and his entrepreneurial ability to reposition himself:
My life has constantly changed as I responded to events, people and
opportunities. I have been divinely blessed by my Creator. Ive also made
deliberate attempts to grow, position myself to receive, and to reposition
myself to receive more (Winston, 1999: 3).
Jakes advice is echoed by other Christian self-help authors. For exam-
ple, in his 2011 book Every Day a Friday: How to Be Happier 7 Days
a Week, Joel Osteen, a televangelist, megachurch pastor and author,
unequivocally asks his readers to lead a no-excuses life:
resonates strongly with T. D. Jakes advice that [y]ou are the only one
who controls the ultimate odds against your own likelihood of success
(Jakes, 2008: 60). Both authors emphasise Christian faith and morality as
sources of a successful life, alongside strong, positive self-belief. Neither
Jakes nor Osteen offer any practical considerations for life improvement.
Instead, their writings are focused entirely on convincing their readers
of their interpretation of Christian morality:
Jesus was saying when you have a setback, or when life deals you a
tough blow, dont be bitter. Dont settle there. Recognize that you are
a prime candidate for God to show His favor and goodness through.
If you feel you are disadvantaged or disabled, instead of saying, Its
not fair, God, your attitude should be: God, Im ready. I know You
have something great in store. I refuse to live defeated and depressed.
I know this disadvantage is simply another opportunity for You to
show up and show out. (Osteen, 2011: Ch. 9)
extreme forms, aims to establish its own beliefs as the only worth-
while ones (Stephens and Giberson, 2011: Introduction). Stephens and
Giberson go on to argue that evangelicalism is characterised by its own
intellectual culture, forms of knowledge, and experts who engage in
debates that largely take place outside the mainstream of American
public life.
And yet, the Christian self-help texts we have surveyed here, writ-
ten by some of the leading gures of US evangelicalism, do not frame
their arguments in terms of the ways of life and the intellectual and
political programmes from which they have emerged. Books like Every
Day a Friday or Reposition Yourself mostly do not make mention of reli-
gious communities or of social communities at large. Social and political
events, such as the great crisis of 2008, and their consequences for
the lives of ordinary people do not gure in their argument. Likewise,
they do not articulate self-help as a collective action programme on
the basis of a shared faith. Instead, their recipes for self-improvement
are highly individualistic. In so far as the characters of their narratives
encounter crises, such as sudden illness, long-term disability, or nancial
difculties, these crises are described as personal troubles and misfor-
tunes disconnected from larger socio-economic, political and cultural
patterns and processes. Therefore, these crises can only be resolved by
cultivating individual values and skills, in particular an abiding religious
faith.
This seeming contradiction might be explained through contempo-
rary developments in the religious landscape of the US. Lyon (2000:
74) argues that religious identities are increasingly fashioned through
processes of consumption, which serve as a redemptive gospel in the
search for meaning. He concludes that religious activity is, increasingly,
subject to personal choice, or voluntarism, and that, increasingly, for
many in the advanced societies, religious identities are assembled to cre-
ate a bricolage of beliefs and practices (Lyon, 2000: 76). Maddox (2012)
and Wade (2015) depict megachurches as corporate spaces pervaded by
the ethos of consumer capitalism, in terms of their organisation, pur-
suit of commercial growth, and the messages they communicate to
their faithful: They sacralise malls, ex-urban sprawl, car-dependency,
single-mindedness, incessant marketing, branding. Their profane is
the world of the non-successful, judged according to the marketing
ideals of happy, suburban families and all-conquering entrepreneurs
(Maddox, 2012: 153). Wade (2015: 9ff.) refers to writings by Rick War-
ren and Joel Osteen to describe the construction of megachurches as
accessible but anonymous consumer spaces, whose happy go lucky
98 Transnational Popular Psychology and the Global Self-Help Industry
In Latin America over the past two decades self-help texts have grown in
both production and circulation, making self-help one of the most pop-
ular book genres across the region. Self-help texts amount to between
13 and 20 per cent of the books sold in the bigger Latin American coun-
tries such as Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Venezuela and Peru
(Souroujn, 2009). Self-help books are notably popular in the region.
As indicated in Chapter 3, the national publishers chamber of com-
merce in Mexico has found that between 3.5 and 4.5 million self-help
books were sold annually in Mexico between 2005 and 2011; similar
trends pointing to an increased circulation of self-help books have also
been identied in other nations in the region1 (Camara Nacional de la
Industria Editorial Mexicana, 2013; Papalini, 2010).
The self-help marketplace in Latin America includes both works by
national authors and bestsellers from the US and Western Europe. In the
past two decades, some of the leading foreign self-help books in the
Latin American book markets have included Spanish translations of
classic self-help works well known to English-speaking readers, such as
Stephen Coveys The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Dale Carnegies
How to Win Friends and Inuence People, Jack Canelds Chicken Soup for
the Soul, and Deepak Chopras The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success and
Ageless Body, Timeless Mind, among others. In contrast to the Spanish
translations of these English-language bestsellers, self-help authors from
Latin American countries incorporate and address national and regional
political and cultural concerns while offering their didactical advice in
their self-help texts (Nehring, 2009a).
But exactly what kind of books can be considered self-help texts in
Latin America? As in the rest of the present work, we identify self-help
101
102 Transnational Popular Psychology and the Global Self-Help Industry
national and regional social concerns are not only presented but also
politically advanced. Additionally, this chapter examines the way in
which narratives on personal and intimate relations in Mexico are
linked to broader transnational self-help narratives particularly those
from the US and to discussions on the ways in which self-help portrays
individuals as having the ability to manage and produce a desired life
change through isolated, autonomous and voluntaristic agency absent
from, or minimally in need of, social interaction and collective social
processes.
included in the vast majority (71 out of the 75) highlighted the impor-
tance of conservative and traditional models of intimate life or stressed
individual choice and responsibility in personal relations. The den-
ing feature of these texts is that they all stress contemporary changes
of intimate life in Mexican society, communicate value judgements
regarding these changes, and propose normative prescriptions regarding
the socially legitimate and personally fullling management of cou-
ple relationships and sexuality in everyday life. By focusing on these
texts, the present chapter brings to the foreground the way in which
a collection of self-help books written by Mexican authors underscore
stability and change in personal relationships, articulate themes linked
to broader, transnational self-help literature, and contribute to struggles
and debates over intimate citizenship.4 The following sections discuss
leading authors and narratives whose work best portrays the two coun-
terpoised trends in Mexican self-help literature on couple relationships:
the defence of the conservative-patriarchal relationship model; and the
advancement of plurality and individual choice in intimate life.
If you have a balanced life before marriage, have fun in a decent and
measured way, it is difcult for you to become corrupted after getting
together with a woman. On the other hand, if you live unhealthily
and without control, when marital problems arise, you will have the
tendency to ee through the wrong door of licentiousness. In the
developed countries the environment among the youth has been
108 Transnational Popular Psychology and the Global Self-Help Industry
What the young women have to learn: Let us return to the quotation
from Titus 2: 35, the topic of our book. In it, seven things are listed
regarding the spiritual, personal, and practical realms which young
women have to learn: First, to love their husbands. Second, to love
their children. Third, to be prudent. Fourth, to be chaste. Fifth, to
take care of their homes. Sixth, to be good. Seventh, to subordinate
themselves under their husbands. (Cant, 2002: 72)
God, knowing us, committed us [women] to the home due to our
nature, which is more emotional [. . .] than that of the man. [. . .] How-
ever, the home is under constant threat by Satan, the adversary of our
souls and the enemy of God, who promotes a licentious and sinful
life, because he knows that by undermining this divine institution [of
the home] he can take control of the souls of his victims. The enemy
of the home is the secular world with its enchantments, its exag-
gerated violence, sensuality, and inversion of moral values. Other
enemies are the negative mass media, pretensions and the search of
wealth, the lack of time, and the tensions caused by the problems of
daily life. (Cant, 2002: 172174)
These two quotes illustrate her strong criticism of social change and
secularisation and their emphasis on a set of universal rules to be
acknowledged by women regarding their family life. The Challenges for
Todays Woman uses conservative interpretations of Christian doctrine
Cultural Struggles, Intimate Life and Transnational Narratives 111
Twenty-ve years ago, the majority of couples married for life. The
term divorce was rejected by all sectors of the population, because
it amounted to an attack against familial unity, the basis of soci-
ety. Then the hippie movement arrived with its pronouncements of
free love without prejudices, whose duration was determined by the
112 Transnational Popular Psychology and the Global Self-Help Industry
couple according to the feelings of both. For the rst time in history,
the woman was given the opportunity to rebel against masculine
domination, to leave the home and stop contributing to its main-
tenance, to express her opinions. [. . .] And thus the divorce epidemic
began. [. . .] Diverse factors of modern life, apart from the described
ones, threaten the union of couple relationships to the degree that
many young people today prefer to dedicate themselves to a profes-
sion, travelling, and insignicant relationships without making any
commitments, and the couples who decide to take the risk out of
love shiver in the face of social changes, which have given greater
importance to materialism than to lasting emotions between men
and women. Nevertheless, not everything is lost. People know that
the basis of society is the family, and that if this basic unit suffers a
great crisis, then we will face grave problems. Mexico, just as all Latin
American countries, is distinguished by the warmth of its residents,
and although the panorama appears desolate, in reality we are in a
very interesting transitory phase. (Miller, 2003: 7)
A near fatal car accident changed the direction of Don Miguels life.
He experienced himself as pure awareness outside of the constraints
of his physical body. He realized that the Toltec wisdom of his family
contained all of the tools needed to change the human mind. Don
Miguel promptly returned to his mother to nish his training and
he became a Shaman [. . .] In the tradition of the Toltec, a Nagual
(shaman) guides an individual to personal freedom. After explor-
ing the human mind from a Toltec as well as scientic perspective,
Don Miguel has combined old wisdom with modern insights and
created a new message for all mankind, based in truth and com-
mon sense. He has dedicated his life to sharing this new message
through practical concepts that promote transformation. His message
is simple and when implemented, even incrementally, changes lives.
(Ruiz, 2013)
Don Miguel Ruizs work is extensive and deals with a range of personal
improvement topics. However, his book most directly linked to intimate
relationships in contemporary Mexico is entitled The Mastery of Love [La
maestra del amor] (2001). In this book, Ruiz places particular emphasis
on the examination of the self and ultimately nding love for oneself as
a precondition to establishing a fullling romantic relationship:
When you tell someone that you love them and they respond well,
I do not love you back, is that a powerful enough reason to suffer?
Being rejected by someone does not mean that you must reject your-
self. If someone does not love you, someone else will. There is always
someone else. And it is best to be with someone who wants to be
with you instead of someone who has to be with you. You have to
focus on the most wonderful relationship which you can have: the
relationship with yourself. It is not a matter of being egotistical, it
is about loving oneself [. . .] you need to love yourself, and when
you do, love will grow inside of you. And when you begin a rela-
tionship with someone else, you will not do so because you need to
feel loved. You will have selected this person and their love. (Ruiz,
2001: 36)
Cultural Struggles, Intimate Life and Transnational Narratives 117
In a similar vein to Don Miguel Ruiz, Olmedo also stresses the need
to love yourself and value your self-worth before you can build and
maintain a meaningful romantic relationship with someone else. But
Olmedo also incorporates the regular practice of masturbation as part of
that process:
First, before you love anyone else, you have to love and explore your-
self [. . .] In order to enhance the orgasm stage, women must and
should explore their genitalia on their own. This is pivotal to nd
out how they can be fully pleased (if that ever does actually occur)
by their partner. Contrary to men, who masturbate more often,
women need to execute this to ensure themselves ultimate pleasure.
(Olmedo, 2010: 89)
The works of Mara Antonieta Barragn Lomel and Silvia Olmedo pre-
sented in this chapter also illustrate glocalised examples of self-help
narratives which emphasise the need for self-actualisation and self-
exploration. Both Barragn Lomel and Olmedo present Mexican urban
centres as globalised cultural locations where singlehood and sexual
exploration and experimentation have a legitimate place in the myriad
of intimate choices as the hegemony of the patriarchal model wanes.
However, just as with Don Miguel Ruiz, these authors mirror a global
self-help formulation which celebrates an inward retreat of the self char-
acterised by a continuous need for self-actualisation as a roadmap to an
elusive sense of self-fullment. In Self-Help, Inc., Micki McGee outlines
the prominence of these same patterns in American and international
self-help texts:
123
124 Transnational Popular Psychology and the Global Self-Help Industry
With its 100 or so stores The Falls at Westmall just outside Port of Spain,
the capital of Trinidad and Tobago, is a smaller version of its grand mall
cousins in North America. This means that mall culture (Underhill,
2005) the experience of visiting and spending time at a shopping mall
and taking part in the logic of consumption while a little less extensive,
is a regular part of weekly life for many residents of Westmoorings,
the name of the residential suburb in the northwest corner of Trinidad
where Westmall is located.
Trinidad and Tobago is an energy-rich nation and Westmoorings has
a lot of wealthy locals and expats. Westmoorings can be described as a
residential suburb for middle- to upper-class families and is well known
nationally for its upscale housing and good schools including the Inter-
national School of Port of Spain. The school includes amongst its many
sponsors the US Embassy, and of its 2014 student population of 345,
some 100 were US citizens.
Opened more than 30 years ago, Westmall caters to a more interna-
tional type of Trinidadian than those malls generally found in the rest of
the island. With its cute rather than impressive water feature and limited
parking, Westmall contains the standard plethora of stores, boutiques
and salons, peddling the international brands that link a global middle
class around the world (Stacey, 2000). Three stores at Westmall are book-
stores, suggesting that while some newspaper columnists might declare
Trinidad and Tobago nationally as not a land of intense readership there
are certainly readers who visit Westmall.
The bookstores
The second store, JAK, is larger and newer. In the window the 50
Shades of Grey series has a display, as do childrens books. Soft gospel
music lls the store and there is a cooling hum from the AC unit. It has
40 display shelves and is busier than the Pavilion with a fair number
of people pottering around and browsing the shelves. The store is well
lit and the three clerks assembled near the cashing area ask customers
if they require assistance. In large plastic sticker footprints on the shop
oor there are occasional quotes by Maya Angelou, Oscar Wilde and
other famous writers.
On entering the store, the rst lane you funnel into contains many
religious, self-help and inspirational book titles. Along this lane are a
couple of couches for sitting and browsing. The walls of the store have a
broad variety of texts, from health books and kids storybooks to inspi-
rational books and romance and ction. There is also a large display
containing biographies of Oprah Winfrey, Pastor Myles Munroe, Malala,
and other well-known gures. Overall there is a much wider and more
diverse selection of books in JAK than in the Pavilion. These include
some self-help books by local and regional authors such as New Begin-
nings by E. Lloyd Smith, printed out of Jamaica by Infotech Trainers
and Consultants Ltd, and Eighteen Lessons from Wayne: Reections on the
Teachings of Dr Wayne Dyer by Trinidadian author Ann Marie Ganness
and published by Balboa Press in the US.
The occasional customer seems to know exactly what he or she is
looking for and the spaciousness of the store allows for browsing by mul-
tiple customers at once without disruption. One woman comes in with
her child and husband; the woman sits and browses while her husband
heads straight for the Bibles and the child to the kids series.
Another young woman comes to the section dedicated to Paulo
Coelho books and is skimming through titles; we ask her what the book
The Alchemist is about. She enthusiastically explains its the best book
Ive ever read! and she got it for her birthday. She explains she never got
to read it, so after school she decided to read it and was mad she never
read it before. Now she reads a lot of Coelhos books and is in the store
today looking for one for a friend.
We ask two of the sales clerks what the bestsellers are. They say,
the inspirational books. We ask which those are. The Joel Osteen,
Robin Sharmas The Monk Who Sold his Ferrari, Joyce Meyer, Paulo
Coelhos The Alchemist. All international bestsellers are among the
stores inspirational books, they conclude.
In a display near the cash till at the front of the store is a shelf labelled
best sellers. A sales clerk advises us however that throughout the store
128 Transnational Popular Psychology and the Global Self-Help Industry
there are bestsellers, so they have no particular place or best sellers list.
When we ask whether they have a particular place for the inspirational
books and self-help books, another sales clerk explains, dey all over the
store it really depends on what people looking for. Where are these
bestsellers from? The copyright information shows the vast majority of
those mentioned are published in the US.
The third store, Pebbles, is also small in comparison to JAK and a closer
equivalent to Pavilion. The self-help books here including the motiva-
tional, religious, self-improvement and how-to books are set up on
display towards the front of the store. Again its the rst aisle a customer
enters and the rst books people will look at because of how they are
positioned.
On the right side of the shelf there are Bibles of every size and kind,
Testaments, Bibles for kids, Bible short-stories, books about prayers for
women; books by Maya Angelou; inspiration for wives, husbands, prayer
and devotion; books about crises of faith, conquering problems, nding
destiny, being mindful, dealing with men and relationships, and loving
oneself.
On the left side there are the biographies of Nelson Mandela, Sarah
Palin, Hillary Clinton, Che Guevara, Bill Clinton, Amy Winehouse,
Malala, Barak Obama and many others. Then there are books about get-
ting ahead in the business world by moguls such as Donald Trump and
other right-wing gures like Glenn Beck and Alan Greenspan. The books
of Malcolm Gladwell such as Outliers, David and Goliath, and What the
Dog Saw are also prominently placed in this row.
Other books include those carrying themes of how to be successful,
building self-condence, and a guide to building investments. These
include titles like Rich Kid, Poor Dad by Robert T. Kiyosak, Mentoring by
John C. Maxwell, and Act like a Success by Steve Harvey.
On the more overtly religious shelves the books range from the very
religious and faith based to battles with faith, keeping faith from differ-
ent perspectives, to working on oneself. These include a host of titles by
Stormie Omartian including The Power of a Praying Husband, many titles
by Elizabeth George such as Loving God with all your Mind and A Young
Womans Guide to Prayer, and Getting to Heaven by Don Piper. In the Joel
Osteen display case there are 12 different titles he has authored.
Thinking about the content of the bookstores and their layout, a sensi-
ble observation might be that within the contemporary popular culture
of patrons of the West Mall bookstores in Trinidad, self-help prod-
ucts broadly conceived are signicant and the books themselves when
seen as commodities produced elsewhere highlight the transnational
The Uses of Self-Help Books in Trinidad 129
Mostly, its if someone tells me they just read this great book and it
really helped me. Otherwise its Oprah, Dr Phil. Or it could be an
interview with the author that catches my eye or somewhere their
story is shown and how the book helped their life. And then Ill see
theyve written a book and I just nd it interesting so I read it.
Self-help is like you do it for yourself. Like I would go and read differ-
ent books, and try to gain knowledge on my own and try to interpret
things in different ways to develop who I am as a person. And mutual
help is more like people helping each other, from community, from
doing things with other groups. Its different to act something out in
a group atmosphere versus reading it. So, its not necessarily one is
better than the other.
Because Ive read so many self-help books Ive learnt so much about
myself. And I think a part about self-development is the fact that
you can look at someone else and know that there are similarities
between you. And by seeing them, youre able to see yourself. Youre
able to see some sort of reection of yourself and sometimes thats
more of an impact than just reading it . . . or if you look at them and
you realise I would never be like that. But then if you really listen to
their story youd be like, Wow Im just like that. And it would make a
difference, you know. Like you could see your own insecurities, your
issues, whatever it is, from listening to them.
person who was basically, who was hosting it. Not hosting it, but she
was leading it. Claire [the leader/practitioner] is a psychotherapist,
she went to school for that. She also does esoteric like therapy, which
is something thats come forth like religion and that sort of stuff.
It has to do with like energy healing and, which is a really, really big
thing here in Trinidad . . . After we had nished, she offered to come
back to Trinidad again and to do a weekend session with the girls.
And everybody gave an overwhelming response of, Yes you should
do that. We needed more time with you.
Readership
When we asked about the types of people the participants thought read
self-help guides Darcie responded: I think its a particular type of person.
I dont nd people here read self-help guides as much as my foreign
friends who tend to read them more. When we asked why, she said,
Because I nd Trinis are so busy kinda being social, I dont think they
reect as much.
Adriana also felt it wasnt that common to read self-help guides
locally: I dont nd that many of my friends read at all. I have like
three friends who are similar to me and use self-help guides. This was a
point further reinforced by Margaret, who thought in general Trinidad
does not have a culture of self-help guide readers:
134 Transnational Popular Psychology and the Global Self-Help Industry
Yet clearly at the same time the 12 participants who spoke with us were
examples of people who read self-help guides not to mention the fact
that the bookstore owners and clerks testied such books are popular
with customers. So what might we infer by their dismissal of a larger
self-help reading culture in Trinidad? UNICEF statistics for 2013 state
the literacy rate in Trinidad and Tobago for 1524-year-olds is 99.6 per
cent, with adult literacy at 99.3 per cent, so it is safe to say Adriana,
Darcie and Margaret are not referring to illiteracy as the reason they
think locals do not read self-help guides.
Perhaps a better way to understand the point being made is to look
more closely at Margaret and Darcies suggestions that (1) Trinidad is
a masculine culture that lacks open-mindedness to think about those
sorts of things; (2) individuals dont try to help themselves out; and
(3) Trinis are so busy kinda being social, I dont think they reect as
much.
Lichterman (1992: 428) noted his respondents mobilised similar dis-
missals as the main reason given when he asked them to imagine the
type of person who would not read self-help books. For Lichterman,
this lack suggests some people believe, and are part of, what he denes
as a/the thin culture of reading self-help books, which supposedly
involves the characteristic of being an open person:
I think I was not critical but I did analyse what I was reading beyond
just reading it and absorbing it. I tried to interpret what they were
telling me, like for example with the rock [from the Secret] that you
could get to hold, I was trying to understand symbolically what it
means and I kind of put my own umm, interpretation of what it was
to me apart from what they tell you in the book.
And what about the writing style of the self-help guides, for exam-
ple the metaphors, stereotypes and clichd titles that are so common?
Darcie responded:
Yeah, the titles will catch you. The reason I like self-help guides too is
they tell you, they give you an example, a man is in the car, a woman
says this, and a man says this and a woman says this, and Im like
O my God! Thats me and then they tell you this is what the man
is thinking, this is what the woman is thinking and this is what we
shouldve done.
title is actually Why Men Dont Listen and Women Cant Read Maps
by Barbara and Allan Pease).
Thinking about Kellners (2003: 9) idea that self-help guides are a form
of cultural pedagogy, we asked questions about self-help guides as a
type of new survivalist literature and whether that was a factor in why
people read them. For Darcie this seemed to resonate but not in the way
we had intended:
For Darcie the guides helped a particular teenaged mind-set, which she
described as in need of knowing that things get better, a sort of cultural
pedagogy for growing up and overcoming common growing experiences
like stress and depression. This is similar to a point made by Furedi
(2002: 16), who suggested that the complex emotional tensions that
are an integral part of the process of growing up are now often dened
as stressful events with which children cannot be expected to cope. For
Darcie self-help guides perhaps entered as a pedagogical niche in her
life, informing her how to overcome feeling all depressed and lame and
whatever.
Furthermore, in offering their daughter a self-help book to overcome
her depression, it would seem Darcies parents displayed some elements
of the precariousness of everyday family life caused by modernity and
the breakdown of parenthood as discussed by Lasch in relation to
American parents:
The invasion of the family by industry, the mass media, and the
agencies of socialized parenthood has subtly altered the quality of
the parentchild connection. It has created an ideal of perfect par-
enthood while destroying parents condence in their ability to per-
form the most elementary functions of childrearing. The American
138 Transnational Popular Psychology and the Global Self-Help Industry
Yeah, for me its like tools you are using, tools for life. A lot of people
say people who read self-help books are depressed or have issues and
cant deal with life on their own and I do agree that I use less of them
as I get older but I think its learning, its all knowledge and maybe
there are different forms of knowledge but its up to you to decide
what information you are going to take or not.
Consumption
For Darcie too, the level of interest in self-help books had declined with
age; this was to do with having less free time. However, even as her inter-
est declined she had found new ways to consume them that allowed her
to multitask:
As Ive got older I probably use self-help guides less, most probably
because I dont have time. I use more audio books recently but Im
more busy generally. Youve also gured out a lot so you dont need
as much [from self-help guides] but then something will come up
thats really interesting and you get really into it. Its not like before
when I used to be obsessed with it when I had time, more teenage to
like 26.
Lisa also said she actively used audio books and Tony Robbins DVDs
instead of the hard copy itself. She said this was because she was a lit-
tle dyslexic and it takes her longer to read a book than watch/listen to
it, and the length of time required to read a whole book could frus-
trate her. This was because she could only read a page or two at night
and she didnt feel she was absorbing as much as when listening to the
audio book.
For Darcie there was more of a synergy between the two:
I like self-help books both on audio and in book. Ill try to read the
book then listen to the audio. I like it to sink in, so I read the pages
over and over, four or ve times so it sinks in because information
comes to me. It takes me a long time to kinda process it, like what
does that mean and how it relates to my life. I wont just read it.
Audio books are amazing in situations where you wanna zone out
like if youre cleaning, washing dishes or youre driving long dis-
tances. I am really obsessed with time wasting so standing in line
at a bank pisses me off so I use to always say if Im listening to this
Im doing something productive. So its just about feeling productive
and feeling productive in times when you have shit to do and you
cant use your mind.
140 Transnational Popular Psychology and the Global Self-Help Industry
Yeah thats for sure, Facebook as well. I nd social media theres a lot
of sharing now in the modern way but I guess any network. So people
on Facebook theyll say like hey I read this great book and youll be
like ok, sure. Or they have clips of authors being interviewed. I mean
thats what my girlfriends do; theyll say do you like so and so? Check
her out. So theres this nexus between the TV host, the book, the
Internet, your Facebook network and they all kinda link up.
history and do not necessarily mean the same thing nationally as they
do abroad. The local cultural institution of sou sou (Winer, 2009: 864),
for example a type of cooperative savings scheme generally found
amongst low-income groups has always been described as a positive
self-help scheme but not in the way Euro-American therapeutic cul-
ture and psychological discourses use the term self-help (Winer, 2009).
For example in 1987 the Trinidad and Tobago government established
a National Commission for Self Help Ltd (NCSHL), whose role was to
ensure the thriving spirit of self-reliance among communities is pro-
moted. They did this by providing some nancial grants for and to an
individual or family. The logic according to the NCSHLs glossy blurb
is, the idea of self-help was to encourage communities to rely on the
resources available and take charge of themselves. It was in this capacity
that the National Commission for Self Help Limited came into being, to
educate communities on the values of self-help and self-reliance.
As such, while a link to the institutionalisation of Laschs culture of
narcissism might seem possible in Trinidad and Tobago it should come
with a dose of cultural relativism. As an analysis of the rst ve years of
the NCSHL programme noted, the primarily state funded organization
attempts to use an indigenous system of self-help to provide services
(Sobers, 1998: 375). These indigenous systems are a reference to his-
toric cultures of sou sou (community savings), gayap (informal housing)
and lend hand, which are documented as longstanding forms of self-
help in Trinidad and Tobago (Winer, 2009: 824, 377, 524). Self-help has
a long history and importance locally as a practical solution for many
low-income families in the Caribbean, including Trinidad and Tobago.
It was a solution to the needs of certain populations rather than waiting
for nascent or absent state organisations to assist. And while this notion
of self-help is not the same denition of self-help travelling in the thera-
peutic discourses arriving from the Global North, the two do share some
elements, including a vision of independence, self-determination and
self-respect. Furthermore, the traditional local understanding of self-
help and the more contemporary transnational denition do meet here
and elsewhere in the region.
In this sense, alongside the transnational discourses of self-help that
arrived with the explosion of the literature on self-help and therapeu-
tic culture more generally since the 1980s in North America, there had
already been an initial institutionalisation of local forms of self-help
and self-reliance in Trinidad and Tobago, which do not simply trans-
late Laschs culture of narcissism from the Global North into local
Trinidadian forms.
144 Transnational Popular Psychology and the Global Self-Help Industry
This call for people to seek the answers to the issues, risks and problems
in their lives from within themselves has, according to many authors
(e.g. Davies, 2015), dissolved the role of communities and other net-
works of social relations in everyday lives. This has wider implications
for larger debates about citizenship, social change and the public sphere.
The danger may have become that such therapeutic discourses are a
political technology of the self and while local readers in Western
Trinidad describe and experience self-help texts as cooler than the
Bible, interesting, about self-development and that they learn so
much about themselves, the impact of therapeutic discourses locally
and elsewhere might be described far more nefariously.
For Rimke (2000), self-help literature has appropriated democratic
liberalisms and neo-liberalisms ways of seeing the individual and the
social world and as such self-help promotes the idea that a good citizen
cares for herself or himself best by evading or denying social relations.
This reality in Trinidad, we might suggest, is not the whole story. Yes,
clearly self-help books as material objects whose production, circulation
and consumption are shaped by a variety of socio-economic and cul-
tural interests at local, regional and transnational levels are found and
enjoyed in Trinidad. And yes, understood in terms of a global assem-
blage (Collier and Ong, 2005) these texts contain discourses which
shape and dene particular moral and material notions of the self.
However, the variety and heterogeneity of discourses available from
mainstream psychotherapeutic to religious-conservative self-help avail-
able in Trinidad and how they mix with already established discourses of
self-help, mutual help and self-reliance do not t neatly into the tradi-
tional academic denitions of individualistic (Giddens, 1991), narcis-
sistic (Lasch, 1991), fearful (Furedi, 2002; Goodman, 2011), or cold
self-formation (Illouz, 2008). This ill-t again might be related to the
interactions of modernities and capitalisms as discussed by Nederveen
Pieterse (2000).
For starters the therapeutic discourses of self-help literature are not
read and consumed uniformly across the island. In Westmoorings it
146 Transnational Popular Psychology and the Global Self-Help Industry
Conclusion
Since the 1970s, neoliberal policies have been implemented the world
over. According to Scott (2013: 9), neoliberalism is a term describing
political positions loosely based on a collection of neoclassical eco-
nomic theories, favouring privatisation and deregulated global markets.
These political positions and their policies produce an economic system
designed towards short-term prot maximisation in place of long-term
societal and environmental balance (2013: 26). These specic policies
slip into our cultures, worldviews and institutions. One central exam-
ple of this can be seen in how identity has been transformed into an
intensely individualised process or culture of narcissism, and how the
importance of community has dissolved (Lasch, 1991: 4).
This occurs because the necessarily unachievable character of self-help
recipes leads to a privatisation and depoliticisation of personal concerns,
which are constructed as matters of psychotherapeutic, medical, spiri-
tual or religious signicance that can no longer be framed as problems
of collective action. This privatisation of personal concerns in turn can
be understood as a central aspect of the process of re-formation and
disciplining of the self in the context of the rise of neoliberal gov-
ernmentalities rst as neoliberal globalisation, latterly as neoliberal
empire throughout the world from the 1970s onwards (Nederveen
Pieterse, 2004).
As mentioned, according to Rimke (2000), this call for people to seek
the answers to the issues, risks and problems in their lives from within
themselves has dissolved the role of communities and other networks of
social relations in everyday lives. This has wide implications, not least in
relation to the importance of social bonds and relations. Essentially, the
importance of community, of the social bonds and relations we share
with others, has been diminished to make way for ideas about the world
based on the importance of the individual above the group.
It has also been argued that the discipline of positive psychology which
has developed out of Western psychology since the mid-1990s and
148 Transnational Popular Psychology and the Global Self-Help Industry
amongst many, a break with the social bonds, lives, and history of those
who came before us; the replacement of religion for some with the tri-
umph of the therapeutic (1991: 13); and, as people increasingly live for
the moment, an erosion of connections to group and personal relations
because people no longer make large investments in love and friendship
in order to avoid excessive dependence on others (Lasch, 1991: 27).
The cultural and political signicance of the narratives provided by
the open-ended interviews in this chapter suggest some of the descrip-
tions Lasch provided in relation to North America in the late 1970s and
early 1990s can also be found here in Trinidad albeit in similar but also
distinct ways in the second decade of the 21st century. For the moment
such discourses are mostly found and spoken of in particular pock-
ets of the country where transnational links and class implications are
most pronounced places like Westmoorings. As such, we might con-
clude that the local consumption of discourses of therapeutic culture in
Trinidad and Tobago which originate in the Global North have territori-
alised themselves here. Yet they do not remain unchanged. They blend
and merge with local socio-cultural and economic realities, impacting
in important ways on how such texts and culture are chosen, sold, read,
consumed, understood, shared, remembered and ultimately used.
In methodological terms, this chapter explored how some individu-
als in Western Trinidad engage with therapeutic products and narratives
in everyday life. It did this by investigating the relationship between
self-help reading and self-help narratives from a bottom-up perspective.
This perspective was collected via open-ended, semi-structured inter-
views. These interviews were contextualised through thick descriptions
and connection to a variety of academic authors, local cultural realities,
secondary sources and discursive effects of self-help literature. A draft
of the chapter was also offered to some of the interviewees in a form
of member checks to enhance the trustworthiness and validity of its
content.
This bottom-up reading of the phenomenon of self-help narratives
and how they are used in Trinidad has been offered as a complemen-
tary perspective to the focus on the production of therapeutic discourses
and their large-scale socio-cultural and political signicance in earlier
chapters. Furthermore, from an anthropological point of view, and in
support of Nederveen Pieterses notion of multiple modernities and
capitalisms (Nederveen Pieterse, 2000), by listening to and trying to
understand the subjective experiences of those consuming self-help dis-
courses in Trinidad, we gained an insiders view of the phenomenon
and the particular circumstances and living arrangements of a specic
The Uses of Self-Help Books in Trinidad 151
group of people who use self-help products. As such, this chapter offered
outsiders looking in, information on what insiders in Trinidad suggest
is most important to them about self-help texts and their accompany-
ing discourses. This local, bottom-up evidence suggested some of the
foreign-produced discourses are often reworked and reorganised by local
sellers, buyers and readers to t local contexts, histories and realities.
This is not to say local readers in Trinidad are socially autonomous and
detached from the top-down structures and pressures of neoliberalism
and neoliberal governmentality. Rather, it is to observe some of the con-
cepts, ideas and neoliberal discourses of therapeutic culture found in
Trinidad and produced elsewhere are remade and reinforced on a sub-
jective and personal level within the context of the global interactions
of modernities.
8
The Politics of Self-Help
Self-help matters
In this book, we have offered two new insights into self-help and, by
extension, therapeutic culture that to date have been signicant omis-
sions in the research literature. These are, rst, the transnationalisation
of self-help culture, and by implication its glocal hybridisation; and,
second, the tension between self-helps discursive heterogeneity and
its relative political-ideological (neoliberal) homogeneity. In develop-
ing these insights across the various chapters we have illustrated how
self-help operates as a multidirectional transnational network with a
dominant nodal centre in the US and UK whose reach extends far
beyond the Global Northwest.
In line with research that has pointed to the globalisation of psy-
chotherapy and psychiatry as forms of medical practice (Damousi and
Plotkin, 2009; Mills, 2014; Roland, 2001), our analysis suggests that ther-
apeutic narratives of self and social relationships now reach deeply into
popular cultures, rationalities and modernities around the globe with
all the cultural and political implications this process entails. The few
authors who have acknowledged this development so far have described
it as a process of cultural standardisation (Binkley, 2011; Illouz, 2008;
Watters, 2010). Thus, in his aptly titled Crazy Like Us: The Globalization
of the American Psyche, Ethan Watters (2010: Introduction) nds himself
unnerved by the way American culture pervades the world and argues
that Americanisation is attening the landscape of the human psyche
itself. We have argued that this cultural essentialism is problematic,
as it diverts attention from the hybrid, simultaneously transnational
and local character of therapeutic narratives, as documented in our case
studies of the UK, the US, China, Mexico and Trinidad.
152
The Politics of Self-Help 153
Transnational self-help
sense of the concept, our case studies do not allow us to make any claims
about self-help as a global phenomenon. It is for this reason that we
describe self-help as a transnational, rather than global, phenomenon.
Whether self-help is indeed global will have to be discovered in future
research.
In terms of conception, authorship and production, Chapter 3 doc-
uments the way in which the discursive centre for self-help can be
most accurately described as emanating from the Anglosphere, i.e. the
universal and cultural industries of Anglo-American self-help that are
widely consistent in terms of the authors and narratives. Within this
Anglosphere, self-help texts ow in both directions; it is not just about
American self-help coming to the UK. Rather self-help culture is a mul-
tidirectional transnational network, within which US self-help plays a
nodal role. In Chapters 3 and 5 we documented some of the ways in
which the US and the UK have been key locations for research about
therapeutic culture and contemporary transformations of self-identity, a
point also supported by Binkley (2011) and Davies (2015). In this sense,
the US and the UK can be suggested as the historical cradle of the self-
help genre and also engines of its ongoing transformation and discursive
shifts in response to the 2008 nancial crisis. But what is the implica-
tion of this nodal centre in the context of how its products are received,
consumed and digested?
In particular, our research suggests the transnationalisation of these
Anglosphere products is not a simple process of hegemonic standard-
isation and unidirectionality. It is not a simple pseudo form of neo-
colonialism or cultural imperialism wherein self-help texts and products
arrive from the Anglosphere much like a Trojan horse full of for-
eign discourses ready to leap out and transform everyday life. Rather,
from our observations and analysis, the transnationalisation of self-
help is more correctly a transcultural process (Ortiz, 2003) and usefully
understood as a multidirectional hybrid formation with specic dis-
cursives and a nodal centre, as illustrated here by the case studies of
China, Mexico and Trinidad. For example, the China case illustrated,
amongst other insights, the transnationalisation of the phenomenon
of self-help entrepreneurs, i.e. the cultural producers, alongside publish-
ers and media institutions providing self-help products. Many might
assume that American-style self-help entrepreneurism with its strate-
gic self-promotion, self-branding, the creation of narrative authority
through self-branding, and the pursuit of brand-based commercial suc-
cess would not travel and territorialise in China due to its supposed
status as the Great Eastern Other. Yet Chapter 4 revealed that self-help
156 Transnational Popular Psychology and the Global Self-Help Industry
Thin selves
In Self-Help, Inc., Micki McGee (2005: 16ff.) links self-help to the emer-
gence of a belabored self in American society. In her narrative, she
frames this as a personality type that emerges as a result of US soci-
etys therapeutic turn, economic insecurity, a precarious labour market,
160 Transnational Popular Psychology and the Global Self-Help Industry
the end of social welfare and more. McGee explains how the promise
of self-help can lead workers into a new sort of enslavement (McGee,
2005: 12). For McGee this means that people have to constantly and
continually work on themselves in efforts to remain employable and
reemployable and that self-improvement is suggested as the only reli-
able insurance against economic insecurity (McGee, 2005: 13, 16). One
way to frame this constant push for self-improvement is that individuals
in the quest for an unattainable reality fall into a cycle where the self is
not improved but endlessly belabored (McGee, 2005: 12).
This argument about re-employability and reliable insurance against
economic insecurity can be linked to Binkleys (2011) and Daviess
(2015) much broader argument that, at the end of the 20th century,
private industry, academics and governments in the Global Northwest
came together to measure, manipulate and promote happiness, due
to increasing evidence that workers on a large scale were increasingly
staying away from work or quitting altogether, citing mental illness
and depression as reasons. In a globalised world where employment
is increasingly precarious and where a vast number of the jobs avail-
able can be described as dead-end or bullshit jobs (Graeber, 2013),
solutions were needed to make work less depressing and workers less
depressed. This included crafting people to be more likely to stick it out
in their dead-end jobs. As such, the self-help industry, the happiness
industry and the antidepressant industry can all be seen as tools in this
endeavour (Binkley, 2011; Davies, 2015). Low self-esteem and unhappi-
ness in the workplace are after all bad for prots because they impact
productivity levels. Our case study of China in many ways eshed out
a similar, yet culturally localised, reality to what Davies and Binkley
describe. For example, the struggles people in the West experience due
to austerity (Dorling, 2014) can be linked to everyday experiences of
hypercapitalism in China. Likewise, the immense popularity of self-help
in China might be seen as part of governmental efforts at population
control. The sending warmth campaign, for example, can be viewed as
a reprogramming of the self, so that the government can avoid political
conict (Yang, 2012).
Our thin self, while similar in some ways, differs from McGees
(2005) belabored self in so far as the thin self focuses on the construc-
tion of self and agency within self-help narratives themselves. Wright
observes that this therapeutic turn in the neoliberal moment is not sim-
ply about social reprogramming and decline; it also provides agency
by drawing attention to how psychological knowledge and therapeu-
tic understandings of the self have given legitimacy to, and furnished
The Politics of Self-Help 161
reference to millennials in the US: A recent study found that young peo-
ple believe that adulthood should be a journey toward happiness and
fullment, meaning and purpose, [and] self-actualisation, one marked
by conscious development, discovery and growth (Aschoff, 2015: 92).
This sounds much like the language used in the Trinidad case study by
Margaret Yeah, for me its like tools you are using, tools for life
and by Darcie, who saw self-help as helping her to know there is some-
thing better across life stages. Neither seemed able to account for the
signicance of biography and structure in inuencing ones life chances.
Instead, both seemed to believe the self-help mantra: demand change of
yourself, rather than demanding change from the system. It was almost
as though self-help narratives allowed them to understand through a
process of cultural pedagogy why certain opportunities were beyond
them. At the same time, both also offered us glimpses of the agency
they possess, either to discredit and be critical of the self-help texts they
read, or to do things for their own growth and happiness.
Final thoughts
you receive from self-help books. Think about the messages con-
tained in that information. What are the beliefs and norms such
messages carry? Think about alternative ways of doing things, rather
than following the loudest and most widely accepted voices. In this
sense, our research seeks to assert the importance of critical reason-
ing, and encourage a mode of thought connecting the larger social,
economic and cultural forces in the world to the individual and
their lives. By examining self-help books we sought to read these
forces critically. We sought to challenge cultural trends that replace
critically committed and politically aware thinking with psycholog-
ically driven, individualistic, uncritical reasoning. In other words,
we sought to re-assert the signicance of the sociological imagina-
tion in the face of widespread and inuential discourses that are
fundamentally inimical to it.
Notes
1 Self-Help Worlds
1. In this sense, in this book we make a clear distinction between therapeutic
culture, understood in terms of the roles which therapeutic narratives play
in popular culture, and medical knowledge and practices in psychotherapy,
psychiatry and so forth. While the former is characterised by its wide diffusion
among diverse audiences, the latter is mostly restricted to specic audiences,
such as medical practitioners, academics, etc.
3 Self-Helps Transnationalisation
1. For a general discussion of attendant issues, see Pitici (2005).
2. The major annual report on the publishing industry in Latin America, El espa-
cio iberoamricano del libro [The Latin American World of Books] unfortunately
does not identify self-help books as a separate genre. For the most recent
edition of the report, see Mojica Gmez (2012).
171
172 Notes
For a starting point into discussions about society, culture and mental life in
China, see Kleinman et al. (2011) and Gerlach et al. (2013).
3. The question to what extent Chinas contemporary socio-economic structures
and policies may be described as neoliberal continues to provoke considerable
debate. In this context, see Keith et al. (2014) and Nonini (2008).
5 Self-Help in Crisis
1. According to the 2011 census, Christianity is the largest religion in the UK
59.3 per cent of the population of England and Wales identied themselves
as Christians. Approximately a quarter of the population did not profess
any religion (Ofce for National Statistics, 2011). According to the results
of the Win/Gallup End of Year Survey 2014, the UK is one of the least
religious countries worldwide, with less than a third of the population describ-
ing themselves as religious (Press Association, 2015). In contrast, The Pew
Research Centers Religious Landscape Survey found that more than three-
quarters of the American population identify themselves as Christian, while
only 4 per cent claimed to be atheist or agnostic (The Pew Research Center,
2013).
2. See Hendriks (2012) for a case study on a distinctive self-help community.
7. In particular, Hector Carrillo (2014) has discussed the ways in which Mexican
migration ows to urban centres in the United States have shaped and inu-
enced homosexual practices, acceptance, and social activism in Mexican cities
where returning Mexican gay immigrants have settled.
174
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Index
191
192 Index
neurasthenia privatisation
in China 556 of personal concerns 16, 26, 147,
Neville, Patricia 31, 126, 146 149, 165
New Age self-help 26 of political concerns 12
Newsday 131 of self 1389
Nielsen BookScan 35, 37, 40 of social life 1667
North/South divide 124 Protestant work ethic 93
Nupcias (magazine) 115 psychiatry 12, 19, 31, 152
and China 56
Psychologies (magazine) 61
Olmedo, Silvia 11819, 121 psychology 15, 162, 166
The Mysteries of Love and Sex individualism of 166
11819
psychopath 80
The Secrets of Eva 118 psychotherapeutic narratives 8, 9,
online booksellers 46 30, 32, 61
Open Books 37 psychotherapy 12, 19, 31, 152, 153
Orman, Suze 81, 84, 100 publishing industry 456
The Road to Wealth 81 crisis of 41
Suze Ormans 2009 Action Plan publishing statistics 3445
812 growth trends and composition
Ortiz, F. 156 3845
Osteen, Joel 91, 95, 97, 98, 100, 108, size and scale 348
120 sources 35
Become a Better You 67
Every Day a Friday 945, 96, 97
rationalisation of social life 12
Ravikant, Kamal
Papalini, Vanina 389 Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends
Parkin, John 4, 8991, 100 on It 117
F K it Therapy 8990 Redden, Guy 267
Parkin, John C. 8990 relationships
patriarchal relationships and Mexican self-help books
in Mexican self-help books 105, 10619
10612, 1201 Rimke, Heidi 27, 28, 99100, 145,
Pavilion bookstore (Trinidad) 1256 147, 162, 165
Peale, Norman Vincent Roberts, Ron 166
The Power of Positive Thinking 3, 4 Robertson, Ronald 33
Pebbles bookstore (Trinidad) 128 Ross Advertising 148
personal branding literature 824 Ruiz, Don Miguel 14, 45, 11517,
personal concerns 121, 156
privatisation of 16, 26, 147, 149, The Four Agreements 115
165 The Mastery of Love 11617
Pieterse, Nederveen 124, 141, 150
politics of self-help 8, 15270 salesmanship 23
positive psychology 146, 1478, 149 Salmenniemi, Suvi 9
China 6970 Scott, B. 147
and neoliberalism 148 Secord, Anne 24
positive thinking 3, 7, 61, 84, 165 Secret, The 8
196 Index