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This chapter presents a new picture of the extent and nature of as well as the channels for the popularization of psychological thought and practice in Britain, focusing on the period from the start of the 20th century to the end of the 1930s. It downplays the enthusiasm for Freud and psychoanalysis, instead draws attention to the ‘practical psychology’ and New Thought movements as well as spiritualism and Pelmanism. It highlights their suspicion of expertise and their interest in self-improvement via the interrelationship between mind, body, and spirit. It uncovers the role of clubs, correspondence courses, and advice literature in the transmission of practical understanding. It also demonstrates a shift in the nature of popular psychology in the interwar period, with greater interest, for instance, in psychoanalysis, sex, and lifestyle, relating this to class, gender, and the increasing influence of experts in the field.

Popular psychology has emerged as one of the major sources of Americans’ self‐understanding. From Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay on “Self‐Reliance” to today, American reading audiences have turned to popular psychologies with the hope of learning how they might inwardly align themselves with the deepest energies of the universe. William James, Abraham Maslow, and Carl Rogers are but a few of the acclaimed academic psychologists who have nurtured this uniquely American form of “psychological spirituality.” As exemplified in the writings of Rev. Norman Vincent Peale, this psychological spirituality has also filtered into the vocabulary with which members of mainstream churches take their religious bearings on life.

This chapter examines key themes in the redemptive self as expressed in the tradition of American self-help and in well-known theories of psychological development. It opens with a survey of American self-help books from the past fifty years and then traces themes of self-help — including the notion that everybody has a good and true inner self that should be explored and eventually actualized in psychological development — from the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson in the 19th century through Freud (who rejected Emerson's view), the humanistic psychologies of Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow, attachment theory, and the self-psychology of Heinz Kohut, and culminating with Oprah Winfrey's extraordinarily American vision of the redemptive self as the recovery of one's original good essence in the face of poverty, addiction, or abuse.

This chapter looks at the portrayal of Mary, Jesus' mother, in the Gospels and in the Jesus biopics. The films ask two major questions: What was Mary's role in Jesus' infancy and childhood? And, what sort of relationship did Mary and Jesus have in his adulthood? It concludes that Mary's cinematic portrayal is affected by the conventional psychological assumptions of modern western society: the connection between childhood experiences and adult identity, and the notion that one of the marks of a mature adult is the quality of her or his relationship with parents and other family members. Also crucial is the role of Mary in Christian, particularly Catholic, theology. While Mary's role in film may be empowering for some women, she is generally cast in a supportive and secondary role.

Chapter Two discusses the emotional economy of interwar Britain, Examining the range of different cultural texts that advised people on the management of emotions, and the desirability of restraint and stoicism, it shows how the British people were encouraged to be self-reflective and to work to understand, and thus manage, their emotions. Self-restraint, it argues, became seen as a key and desirable aspect of modernity. The chapter begins by examining the impact of the Great War on grief and religious practice in the interwar period before examining the development of a historically specific emotional economy that valued self-reflection and restraint. It concludes by discussing the growth of a popular psychology in the 1930s, and the impact of this focus on emotional self-management on British people as they prepared for a second, devastating, war.

For all the success, Passages was not to everybody’s liking—and if Sheehy’s feminist framework and engagement with social science made her concept of midlife crisis popular, they also constituted a critical target. The most influential criticism came from psychologists, psychiatrists, and psychoanalysts. Rather than rejecting the idea of middle life reinvention, they appropriated and reversed it. Chapter 5 makes visible the anti-feminist politics that motivated the redefinition of the midlife crisis and shows how the notion of popularization was weaponized to silence Sheehy. In the wake of Passages, the psychologist Daniel Levinson and the psychiatrists George Vaillant and Roger Gould advanced a male-centered definition of midlife rejuvenation that echoed Playboy fantasies and barred women from changing their lives. Demarcating “professional” from “popularized” science allowed them not just to discredit Sheehy’s authority, as other instruments of boundary work would have done; it also created expert competence over a concept of popular culture: Levinson, Vaillant, and Gould cast Sheehy’s bestseller as a watered-down version of their own research. This was successful: anti-feminism was allowed to parade as better science and the term “midlife crisis” was now primarily connected to men and corroborated, rather than abolished, traditional gender hierarchies.

This chapter discusses the success of narratives that focus on a protagonist's therapeutic trajectory from suffering self to successful entrepreneur, and suggests that writers have themselves been crucial models of this therapeutic biography. It begins by discussing Aravind Agida's 2008 novel The White Tiger as a critique of the neoliberal rhetoric of entrepreneurial innovation. The novel suggests that this rhetoric downplays dependence on an expanding service class, and requires its protagonist's anti-social conception of the flexible self as an engine of capital accumulation. The chapter compares Adiga's work to Monica Ali's 2009 novel In the Kitchen, homing in on its depiction of the breakdown of Gabriel, an aspiring restaurant owner who embodies many of the features of the creative worker imagined by New Labour policy.

This chapter examines some of the psychological, philosophical, theological, and legal foundations of the Scientology religion in postwar America in the early 1950s. The process by which L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics movement transformed into the institutionalized religion of Scientology provides scholars of American religion a documented history of the birth and construction of a new religion in Cold War America—one that freely assimilated influences from Eastern and Western religion, popular psychology, and science fiction. In the 1950s, Dianetics organizations faced a major legitimation crisis when the legal rights to use “Dianetics” were temporarily lost to an outside investor. Before reacquiring them, Hubbard had already begun to brand “Scientology” as the spiritualized (and administratively centralized) outcome of Dianetics techniques. Two of the most central innovations during this transition were an emphasis on out-of-body experiences (“exteriorizations”) and especially the recollection of past lives, both of which informed Hubbard’s mental and spiritual counseling.