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"If a Nobel Prize were awarded for clarity and sanity in a world gone mad, Wendy Kaminer would be on her way to Stockholm." -- Newsday Anyone who's ever wondered why talking about addiction has become so fashionable, shuddered on hearing an "adult child" compare his upbringing with the Holocaust, or felt that admitting one's powerlessness is a frightening prospect for a participatory democracy will be delighted by this bracingly outspoken and intelligent work of social criticism. Whether she is infiltrating twelve-step meetings and codependency workshops or evaluating the claims of gurus from Shirley MacLaine to M. Scott Peck, Wendy Kaminer deftly diagnoses a national movement (and multi-million-dollar industry) with a strong tendency toward authoritarianism, a cult of victimhood, and a nasty streak of covert religiosity. Controversial, original, and brilliantly reasoned, I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional changes the way we think about self-help -- and helps us to think for ourselves. "Explores...the ominous effect of all this institutionalized whining on our culture and politics...an incisive and provocative argument." -- Washington Post "Extremely witty...Ms. Kaminer has a real gift for honing her anger to an epigrammatic edge....We can make good use of [her] skepticism." -- The New York Times Book Review… (more)
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The irony is, one of Kaminer's chief complaints about the somewhat ill-defined self-help movement is that it blunts our critical thinking: she wants a nation of critical thinkers who won't analyze this book too closely. Kaminer doesn't offer any analytical evidence of how the self-help movement actually affects our society, she merely utters extremely vague warnings" "imagine the effect ... ." Nor does she have much evidence as to how people typically use self-help: a reader might gain useful insights without letting the book rule their life or joining a cult around the author. The "self-help movement" is a phrase that is tossed around a great deal, but what is Kaminer actually referring to? Any book that lumps together Norman Vincent Peale, Wicca, Alcoholics Anonymous and M. Scott Peck is covering a lot of ground. (It has never occurred to me to think of Wicca as a "self-help movement"; I guess Kaminer just doesn't like it and decided to throw it in for good measure.) All of philosophy and theology could be thrown into such a broad categorization. It would have been better if Kaminer had stuck to specific criticisms of specific books instead of trying to generalize about such a variety of works.
Kaminer's main arguments are two - one is that if you agree with her, the two of you will share the pleasure of sneering smugly at others. Secondly, she keeps informing us that whatever it is doesn't appeal to her as if we should be just overwhelmed that ***!!!!Wendy Kaminer!!!!*** doesn't approve.
I actually read this a long time ago. It came back to me when I was reading Paul Collins' fascinating The Trouble with Tom: The Strange Afterlife and Times of Thomas Paine, and read the discussion of phrenology in the early 19th century. Kaminer seems to assume that all this is a recent phenomenon, falling back, I suppose, on the common tendency to think that things are going to pot these days but were much better at some vague time in the past. Actually, books of advice have been extremely popular since the the printing press made reading materials generally available: they were the best sellers of 16th century England. Moreover, most of these books are based, legitimately or otherwise, on psychology and/or religion, both of which predate our time. Kaminer has indicated a respect for psychology in other books, and religion certainly preceded the founding of the Republic that she argues is now endangered by self-help books. So what has happened? She compares, for example, a belief in the 12-step higher power with devotion to a political demagogue. In the first place, a disembodied, individually conceived "higher power" is not capable of running for President-for-Life. In the second place, how does this differ from religion in general (which Kaminer never directly deals with)? Indeed, religious movements seem to me to be far more likely to be used for demagoguery: when was AA a voting bloc?
Some people do get pretty silly over these books, but is that because of the book, or because they're silly? Are their individual lives actually better or worse without the book? I know several people who work professionally with alcoholics who think that AA can be tremendously helpful. Sure, it would be better if no-one was inclined towards alcoholism, but that isn't one of the choices. The members of AA, et al., feel that they are better off with the program than without it. Kaminer gives us no reason to believe that she is a better judge of what is good for them than they are.
Toward the end of her book, she expresses her hope that we will drop all this nonsense and learn to think sharply and insightfully. She doesn't explain how she expects people who are too moronic to read these advice books critically are supposed to effect this transformation.