Criticism
Scholars have targeted self-help claims as misleading and incorrect. In 2005, Steve Salerno portrayed the American self-help movement—he uses the acronym SHAM: the Self-Help and Actualization Movement—not only as ineffective in achieving its goals, but also as socially harmful. 'Salerno says that 80 percent of self-help and motivational customers are repeat customers and they keep coming back whether the program worked for them or not'. Others similarly point out that with self-help books 'supply increases the demand...The more people read them, the more they think they need them...more like an addiction than an alliance'. Self-help writers have been described as working 'in the area of the ideological, the imagined, the narrativized....although a veneer of scientism permeates the work, there is also an underlying armature of moralizing'.
Read more about this topic: Personal Development
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“To be just, that is to say, to justify its existence, criticism should be partial, passionate and political, that is to say, written from an exclusive point of view, but a point of view that opens up the widest horizons.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)
“A friend of mine spoke of books that are dedicated like this: “To my wife, by whose helpful criticism ...” and so on. He said the dedication should really read: “To my wife. If it had not been for her continual criticism and persistent nagging doubt as to my ability, this book would have appeared in Harper’s instead of The Hardware Age.””
—Brenda Ueland (1891–1985)