The Postmodern Phenomenon
It is however in the last half-century or so that the humble self-help book has jumped to cultural prominence, a fact admitted by both the advocates and the critics - often highly polarised - of the self-improvement genre. Some would 'view the buying of such books...as an exercise in self-education'. Others, more critical, still concede that 'it is too prevalent and powerful a phenomenon to overlook, despite belonging to "pop" culture'.
For better or worse, it is clear that self-help books have had 'a very important role in developing social concepts of disease in the twentieth century', and that they 'disseminate these concepts through the general public so that ordinary people acquire a language for describing some of the complex and ineffable features of emotional and behavioral life'.
Where traditional psychology and psychotherapy will tend to be written in an impersonal, objective mode, many self-help books 'involve a first-person involvement and often a conversion experience': in keeping with the self-help support groups on which they often draw, horizontal peer-support and validation is thus offered the reader, as well as advice "from above".
Yet arguably with the movement from the self-help group to the individual "self-improvement" reader something of that peer support has been lost, reflecting the broader way that 'over the course of the last three decades of the twentieth-century, there has been a significant shift in the meaning of "self-help"'. A collective enterprise has become a refashioning of the individual self: 'in less than thirty years, "self-help" - once synonymous with mutual aid - has come to be understood...as a largely individual undertaking'.
Read more about this topic: Self-help Book
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