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'.
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“... criticism ... makes very little dent upon me, unless I think there is some real justification and something should be done.”
—Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962)
“Like speaks to like only; labor to labor, philosophy to philosophy, criticism to criticism, poetry to poetry. Literature speaks how much still to the past, how little to the future, how much to the East, how little to the West.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Cubism had been an analysis of the object and an attempt to put it before us in its totality; both as analysis and as synthesis, it was a criticism of appearance. Surrealism transmuted the object, and suddenly a canvas became an apparition: a new figuration, a real transfiguration.”
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