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Samuel Smiles, born in 1812, was an influential figure in the 19th-century “self-help” movement. His book, Self-help: With Illustrations of Character, Conduct and Perseverance (1859) grew out of a series of lectures, designed for self-improvement, which he gave to young men as editor of the Leeds Times newspaper. This chapter presents passages from an 1862 American edition of that work. His theme was that diligent self-culture, self-control, and self-discipline held the key to human fulfillment; his motto: “It all depends on me.” Smiles's emphasis on and disgust with the unmanly, unmasculine quality of the Romantic melancholy popularized by Goethe and Byron may account in significant part for the curious gender reversal by which, toward the end of the 19th century melancholy, melancholia, and related responses came to be associated with women and the feminine.

Critics have interpreted the therapeutic trend as a replacement of community-oriented morality with self-oriented therapeutic values such as self-esteem, self-fulfilment, and authenticity. They charge that exporting therapeutic attitudes from the clinic to the community erodes moral responsibility by fostering moral subjectivity and shallowness, lowering moral aspiration, and encouraging selfishness and a victim mentality. This chapter responds to these charges, including their application to self-help groups and moral education, and argues that the critics identify genuine dangers but exaggerate them. For the most part, the therapeutic trend integrates morality with therapy, albeit with varying degrees of success, rather than abandoning it.

This chapter discusses the hybrid political/therapeutic approach of feminist self‐help groups of the very early 1980s, which developed an analysis of internalized oppression that linked the political and the personal. Like their immediate feminist predecessors, these women constructed influential experiential knowledge about child sexual abuse, expanding on the politics and techniques of self‐help. They drew on and contributed to identity politics, constructing a collective identity as survivors. They also sought to influence how professional psychotherapy addressed child sexual abuse. They have been analyzed as part of a therapeutic turn in feminism; this chapter argues that the therapeutic turn remained fundamentally oriented toward social change.

This chapter recounts the rise of single‐issue self‐help groups during the 1980s, showing how they both reflected and transformed the approach of their forebears and helped to popularize a modified analysis of child sexual abuse as widespread, but not as a result of gender inequality. These groups included men as well as women, defined sexual abuse in gender‐neutral terms, and focused on promoting self‐help. They advocated for survivors' issues and increased visibility, but eschewed other political issues. They were an important force in making the issue visible in mainstream culture.

This chapter traces the development of a repoliticized self‐help movement focused on visibility politics in the wake of the countermovement. It discusses the construction of a repoliticized collective identity among survivor activists, their understanding of self‐help as political, and their emphasis on identity disclosure, or coming out, as a political tactic. The chapter discusses the notion of visibility politics as including activist art, speak‐outs, and identity disclosures in daily life. It analyzes the tactical implications of identity disclosure and emotional transformation within social movements, and discusses the role of visibility politics in social movements more generally.

This chapter assesses what makes the novel associate printed matter with interruption in particular. It also asks what difference does it make that the act in which the characters are interrupted consists not of reading, but rather of using an unread book as a material prompt or alibi for inwardness and abstraction. The bait and switch that structures the midcentury bildungsroman sets readers up to expect a novel about an agent shaped by books, only to reveal the protagonist instead as an object compared to books. As the plot of David Copperfield turns a child who is acted upon into an adult who acts, its trope shifts from metaphor to metonymy. As a result, it turns only belatedly into a proto-Smilesian account of self-help. Its first debt is to an older genre that associates selfhood with helplessness and passivity—more specifically, that locates consciousness not in a person marked by books, but in a book marked by readers.

This chapter focuses on the challenges health social movements face in their efforts to achieve legitimation—sociopolitical and cultural recognition and acceptance—from actors with vested interests in institutions such as mainstream medicine and health and human services. The author explores how the self‐help movement simultaneously challenges institutional authority in medicine and health care while seeking the approbation of those interests. This chapter considers multiple sources of legitimation for self‐help organizations and where sympathetic actors are positioned in a variety of disparate fields, including medicine, academia, politics, and popular media. To understand how these actors shaped self‐help, Archibald examines longitudinal trends in targeted fields of influence and asks three related questions: (1) Are some sources of legitimation more important than others? (2) Do these have differential effects in self‐help specialty niches? and (3) How do these effects impact niche growth? Results confirm that medical, academic, political, and popular legitimation make unique contributions to the self‐help movement, that the importance of each varies dramatically by specialty niche, and that legitimation has a differential impact on niche growth.

Taylor and Leitz trace processes of collective identity construction and politicization among women suffering from postpartum psychiatric illness who have been convicted of infanticide. Joining a growing body of research suggesting that self‐help and consumer health movements can be a significant force for change in both the cultural and political arenas, Taylor and Lietz examine one such movement, a pen‐pal network of women incarcerated for committing infanticide. Taylor and Leitz show how a sense of collective identity fostered by the pen‐pal network triggered a profound emotional transformation in participants, allowing them to convert shame and loneliness into pride and solidarity, and encouraging their participation in efforts to change how the medical and legal system treat postpartum psychiatric illness.

This chapter locates U.S. health institutions in the context of American society and culture, exploring “American Exceptionalism” and its implications for the particular structure and culture of health institutions. This context limits and shapes the forms and processes of social movements and collective action that occur. The chapter then uses the earlier chapters, as well as the broader literature, to argue how U.S. health institutions shape, and are shaped by, social movements. The range is broad and includes research that deals with movements aimed at shaping the overall financing and governance of U.S. health institutions, the internal workings of organizations, professions, and occupations, self‐help movements, and movements about particular disease and disability entities. One of main questions raised is the relevance of contemporary social movement theory, largely dealing with political movements, for the analysis of movements oriented towards specific institutions. Key concepts of institutional theory are also discussed. The key concepts of contemporary theory, with modifications, can be usefully employed in examining institutional movements. These key concepts include fields, framing processes, political opportunities, resources, collective identity, and mobilization processes.

This chapter documents the decline of inmate participation in prison work, treatment, and education programs. It considers these trends in light of the growing amount of research documenting what works, and the changing nature of inmates' characteristics. The data show that U.S. prisons today offer fewer services than they did when inmate problems were less severe, although history shows that not much has been invested in prison rehabilitation. Today, just one-third of all prisoners released will have received vocational or educational training while in prison. And despite the fact that three-quarters of all inmates have alcohol or drug abuse problems, just one-fourth of all inmates will participate in a substance abuse program prior to release. The treatment programs consist mostly of inmate self-help groups rather than the intensive therapeutic communities found to be most effective.

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.

During the Victorian period, England witnessed a dramatic change in the education of mentally disabled children. Before the early 19th century, idiots were thought to be uneducable. Indeed, the very definition of idiocy revolved around the inability of idiots to be ‘improved’. The moral education of idiot children incorporated traditional classroom teaching, workshop apprenticeship, and the inculcation of accepted norms of social behaviour. All three were to be incorporated within the therapeutic milieu of idiot asylums such as the Earlswood Asylum, where education was also based on a Victorian belief in the organicist origins of mental disability. This organicist understanding of mental handicap was central to the medical model of idiocy — that physical defects of unknown origin were preventing the true expression of the idiot mind. The philosophical underpinnings of education at the Earlswood Asylum were based on a post-Enlightenment belief in the perfectibility of humankind, a Victorian faith in the improvement of individuals, and a non-conformist desire to see spiritual improvement through employment and self-help.

This chapter analyses the impact of growth on development in the context the experience of Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh in south India. It argues that the translation of growth into development is conditioned by the nature of the growth process and the presence of institutions that facilitate development. The record of Karnataka on development is relatively poor compared to that of Andhra Pradesh, though its growth rate is, in general, higher than that of the latter. The chapter attributes this phenomenon to the elitist nature of growth in Karnataka as opposed to the populist nature of growth in Andhra Pradesh.

This chapter describes the unisex or general-audience advice literature, exploring the new survivalism that emerges against the background of a continuing inward turn. In The Road Less Traveled, M. Scott Peck recounts his spiritual “journey” from the secular medical realm of psychiatry to a hybrid realm of psychotherapeutic and Christian values. Anthony “Tony” Robbins and Stephen Covey represent two distinct traditions of self-improvement culture: the former privileges emotion and the affective dimension while the latter heralds the superiority of reason, planning, and time management. The New Age inheritors of New Thought posit a world in which there is ultimately no distinction between self and other, matter and energy, reality and imagination. The generic literature of self-help during the last quarter of the twentieth century signaled an intensification of tendencies in American culture that had been evident, in some cases, since the nation's founding.

This chapter investigates more completely just how laborious the work of “inventing a self” can be, and how the ideal of individual self-mastery—which is at the heart of most self-help literature—relies on the unacknowledged servitude of others. In describing the nature of work on the self, the literatures of self-improvement give two distinct options: the path of endless effort and the path of absolute effortlessness. The Maudlin Exemplar manages the notion of misfortune and suggests that self-mastery is the fundamental prerequisite for success. The impossibility of finding one's “authentic” self is mitigated by the possibility of accessing, at least, one's most persuasive self. The ideal of life as a work of art is meant to insulate the self from the more economistic metaphor of life as a business, but in the end it fails to do so when it elevates work over labor, the reproduction of life itself.

This book investigates how the promise of self-help can lead workers into a new sort of enslavement – into a cycle where the self is not improved but endlessly belabored – and explores the shifts in self-improvement culture in an era of dramatic economic and social changes. It also provides a glance of how the cultures of personal transformation, though largely a force for maintaining the status quo, might be mined for progressive political opportunities. When social and economic structures—gender role expectations and employment conditions—undergo dramatic changes, individual and interpersonal change is inevitable. The culture of self-improvement is seen as fragmented, varied, mutable, and, at least in theory, potentially emancipatory. This chapter provides an overview of the chapters included in the book. The forced labor of self-making, the belaboring of our selves, is at the centre of the book's discussion.