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Within classical antiquity, Hesiod's Works and Days "opens with moral remonstrances, hammered home in every way that Hesiod can think of."[4] The Stoics offered ethical advice "on the notion of eudaimonia — of well-being, welfare, flourishing."[5] The genre of mirror-of-princes writings, which has a long history in Greco-Roman and Western Renaissance literature, represents a secular cognate of Biblical wisdom-literature. Proverbs from many periods, collected and uncollected, embody traditional moral and practical advice of diverse cultures. The hyphenated compound word "self-help" often appeared in the 1800s in a legal context, referring to the doctrine that a party in a dispute has the right to use lawful means on their own initiative to remedy a wrong.[6] For some, George Combe's "Constitution[1828], in the way that it advocated personal responsibility and the possibility of naturally sanctioned self-improvement through education or proper self-control, largely inaugurated the self-help movement;"[7] In 1841, an essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson, entitled Compensation, was published suggesting "every man in his lifetime needs to thank his faults" and "acquire habits of self-help" as "our strength grows out of our weakness."[8] Samuel Smiles (1812–1904) published the first self-consciously personal-development "self-help" book — entitled Self-Help — in 1859. Its opening sentence: "Heaven helps those who help themselves", provides a variation of "God helps them that help themselves", the oft-quoted maxim that had also appeared previously in Benjamin Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanac (1733–1758). In the 20th century, "Carnegie's remarkable success as a self-help author"[9] further developed the genre with How to Win Friends and Influence People in 1936. Having failed in several careers, Carnegie became fascinated with success and its link to self-confidence, and his books have since sold over 50 million copies.[10] Earlier in 1902 James Allen published As a Man Thinketh, which proceeds from the conviction that "a man is literally what he thinks, his character being the complete sum of all his thoughts." Noble thoughts, the book maintains, make for a noble person, whilst lowly thoughts make for a miserable person; and Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich (1937) described the use of repeated positive thoughts to attract happiness and wealth by tapping into an "Infinite Intelligence".[11] Dr Neville Yeomans, an Australian psychiatrist, clinical sociologist, psychologist and barrister pioneered self-help and mutual help in Australia through his pioneering work at Australia's first therapeutic community Fraser House (1959–1968), an 80-bed residential unit in North Ryde Sydney; and former inmates of this unit started many self-help groups around Sydney.[12] Postmodern influence In the final third of the 20th century "the tremendous growth in self-help publishing...in self-improvement culture"[13] really took off — something which must be linked to postmodernism itself — to the way "postmodern subjectivity constructs self-reflexive subjects-in-process."[14] Arguably at least, "in the literatures of self-improvement...that crisis of subjecthood is not articulated but enacted — demonstrated in ever-expanding self-help book sales."[15] The conservative turn of the neoliberal decades also meant a decline in traditional political activism, and increasing "social isolation; Twelve-Step recovery groups were one context in which individuals sought a sense of community...yet another symptom of the psychologizing of the personal"[16] to more radical critics. Indeed, "some social theorist [sic] have argued that the late-20th century preoccupation with the self serves as a tool of social control: soothing political unrest...[for] one's own pursuit of self-invention."'[17] The market Within the context of the market, group and corporate attempts to aid the "seeker" have moved into the "self-help" marketplace, with LGATs[18] and psychotherapy systems represented. These offer more-or-less prepackaged solutions to instruct people seeking their own individual betterment[citation needed], just as "the literature of self-improvement directs the reader to familiar frameworks...what the French fin de siecle social theorist Gabriel Tarde called 'the grooves of borrowed thought'."[19] A sub-genre of self-help book series also exists: such as the for Dummies guides and The Complete Idiot's Guide to... — compare how-to books. Statistics At the start of the 21st century, "the self-improvement industry, inclusive of books, seminars, audio and video products, and personal coaching, [was] said to constitute a 2.48-billion dollars-a-year industry"[20] in the United States alone. By 2006, research firm Marketdata estimated the "self-improvement" market in the U.S. as worth more than $9 billion — including infomercials, mail-order catalogs, holistic institutes, books, audio cassettes, motivation-speaker seminars, the personal coaching market, weight-loss and stress-management programs. Marketdata projected that the total market size would grow to over $11 billion by 2008.[21] In 2012 Laura Vanderkam wrote of a turnover of 12 billion dollars.[22] In 2013 Kathryn Schulz examined "an $11 billion industry".[23] Self-help and professional service delivery Self-help and mutual-help are very different to — though they may complement — service delivery by professionals: note for example the interface between local self-help and International Aid's service delivery model.[24] Conflicts can and do arise on that interface, however, with some professionals considering that "the twelve-step approach encourages a kind of contemporary version of 19th-century amateurism or enthusiasm in which self-examination and very general social observations are enough to draw rather large conclusions."[25] |
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