Talk of the Town - Better people suck December 12 2001

I was listening to a new client engage in a litany of negative self-judgment recently and found myself blurting out this question: “Have you read a lot of self-help books?”

“Well, maybe. But what do you mean?” she asked.

“Well, why don’t you just tell me the name of the last book you read.”

“Oh, it was, um, something like, let’s see. It was ... How to ... No, it was If you .... I don’t remember.”

“The reason you don’t remember,” I told her, “is that they are almost all useless. Please don’t read another one. There’s nothing wrong with you except your conviction that there’s something wrong with you.”

I read plenty of self-help books myself until about 10 years ago. My client and I agreed that during the time one is reading such a book, and for a short while after, there’s a sense of having found the answer. But soon enough, you have reverted to your neurotic self and are back at Borders madly poring through self-help books like an overeater rifling through bags of potato chips at Kroger in search of a new flavor.

The turning point for me was The Celestine Prophecy. I was astounded that such a badly written book could be published at all. We’re talking bad grammar and punctuation, as well as content that is a kind of mystification of a Psychology 101 class. But I was blown completely away when people I respect began defending this simple-minded crypto-literate book. Leave it to us Americans, the people who made Forrest Gump president, to praise stupidity if it has even a kernel of truth to it.

Then there’s John Gray’s regressive gender text, Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus. Ignoring several decades of feminist scholarship and discourses on the construction of gender and sexuality, Gray’s book endeavors to restore gender binarism because, well, it makes explaining everything much easier.

And right on its heels came an avalanche of prosperity consciousness books, all of whose names I’ve forgotten — undoubtedly because my low self-esteem sabotages everything, including the means of making myself rich enough to buy the entire library and decorative accessory collection of Deepak Chopra, the Martha Stewart of self-improvement.

Things haven’t gotten much better in the last 10 years as far as I can see. There are helpful books, obviously, but the more popular ones are popular for the simple reason of their superficiality. Even formerly “deep” people like Joan Borysenko seem to have followed “Deep Pockets” Chopra into the veil of the quick fix. My holiday catalog from Hay House, one of the self-help dope dealers, includes a new title from Borysenko, Inner Peace for Busy People. One of the original mind-body researchers, Borysenko has written 52 short essays — one for each week of the year — that make it at long last possible to fit happiness into your schedule.

Ugh.

Of course, the present inspirational potboiler is the Prayer of Jabez, a book that has become part of the atmosphere, like pollen and diesel fumes. If you can’t bear to read its 93 pages, you can buy the set of 50 little cards lettered with inspirational thoughts. The best thing I can say about it is that it doesn’t display the astonishing hubris of Conversations With God by Neale Donald Walsch. Oh, there is also a card set now to boil down the other popular inane book of the moment, The Four Agreements. Thank God, it’s only 12 cards.

Are you noticing a trend here? Most everything is numbered, beginning with the nine “insights” in The Celestine Prophecy. The numbering underscores the reductionism of the texts and ought to be sufficient reason to be suspicious about their value. Don’t we all know in our hearts that when anyone starts ticking off what we need to do to make our lives better, we are in danger of infantilizing ourselves? This pantheon of pop psychologists and New Age spiritualists is simply another collective working in loco parentis for big bucks.

The reason I find this so disturbing is that it really has had an enormous impact on psychological culture and, therefore, on our understanding of ourselves. The result is a loss of depth and a new rush by people to pathologize difference — because what most of these books do is re-establish fundamentalism by relocating it in spiritual and pop-psych culture. They tell you, for example, that the body is good, compared to classic fundamentalism, but then they insist, like Montel Williams’ Body Change, that you find the “athlete within” and get a gym-bunny bod.

Last year, I had a client, a poet, who had not written anything in six months. Listening to him was like catching bits of conversation at a New Age fair — a jumble of psychological spiritualizations. It didn’t take long to realize that he’d become afraid of the darkness of his own imagery and had “turned to the light.” Of course, moths do this too, ignoring their nature, and burning up as a consequence. Some of us — poets especially — are meant to see in the dark. My work with this client was intended to help him reclaim that capacity, to cultivate his difference, to turn from the light.

So please, don’t buy anyone a self-help book this Christmas. If you want to inspire someone, buy them a really good novel or a memoir. Certain reflections, like Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet or James Hillman’s early texts (like Revisioning Psychology) are useful precisely because they share insight without becoming explicitly prescriptive.

The point is to deepen our understanding, not to become better people. Better people suck.??