The Self-improvement Handbook

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'