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A self-help book is a book or text that is written with the intention to instruct its readers how to solve their personal problems. They take their name from Self-Help, an 1859 best-selling book by Samuel Smiles, but are sometimes known and classified as "self-improvement" books and media. Self-help books moved from a position in a niche market to much wider adoption and use in the late twentieth century.Micki McGee, Self-help, Inc.: Makeover Culture in American Life (Oxford 2005) p. 11
In classical Rome, Cicero's On Friendship and On Duties became "handbooks and guides" for Roman readers,H. J. Rose, A Handbook of Latin Literature (London 1967) p. 184-5 and Ovid wrote both the Art of Love and Remedia Amoris. The former has been described as dealing "with practical problems of everyday life: where to go to meet girls, how to start a conversation with them, how to keep them interested, and...how to be sociable rather than athletic in bed";Eric Berne, Sex in Human Loving (Penguin 1970) p. 226 the latter has been described as containing "a series of instructions, as frank as they are ingenious and brilliantly expressed, on falling out of love".Rose, p. 330
Some scholars of the Islamic Golden Age also wrote books that could be categorized as self-help books. One prominent example is Al-Ghazali who wrote Ay farzand (O son!): a short book of counsel that al-Ghazali wrote for one of his students. Another is Disciplining the Soul, which is one of the key sections of The Revival of the Religious Sciences.
During the European Renaissance, a line of descent may be traced back from Smiles' Self-Help to "the Renaissance concern with self-fashioning" which "produced a flood of educational and self-help materials":Frank Whigham/Wayne A. Rebhorn eds., The Art of English Poesie (New York 2007) p. 33 The Florentine Giovanni della Casa in a 1558 book of manners published suggests "It is also an unpleasant habit to lift another person's wine or his food to your nose and smell it".Erving Goffman, Relations in Public (Penguin 1971) p. 71 The Middle Ages saw the genre personified in " Conduir-amour" ("guide in love matters").C. G. Jung ed., Man and his Symbols (London 1978) p. 196
In the 1960s, self-help books achieved greater cultural prominence, a fact admitted by both advocates and critics of the self-improvement trend. 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 popular culture'.. Quote by Steven Starker.
Where traditional psychology and psychotherapy texts tend to be written in an impersonal, objective mode, many self-help books 'involve a first-person involvement and often a conversion experience' with their prose.Davis, p. 173. In a tone similar to the self-help support groups from which many examples draw, horizontal peer-support and validation are offered the reader through tone as well as substantive advice.
However, the movement from the self-help group to the individual reader causes most peer support to be lost, reflecting that 'over the course of the last three decades of the twentieth-century, there was a significant shift in the meaning of "self-help" to a largely individual undertaking'.McGee, pp. 18–19.
Perhaps the best-known fictional embodiment of the world of the self-help book is Bridget Jones. Taking 'self-help books...as a new form of religion'Helen Fielding Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (Picador 2000) p. 75 – 'a kind of secularised religion – a sort of moral values lite'McGee, p. 20 – she struggles to integrate its often conflicting instructions into a coherent whole. 'She must stop beating herself over the head with Women Who Love Too Much and instead think more towards Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus...see Richard's behaviour less as a sign that she is co-dependent and loving too much and more in the light of him being like a Martian rubber band'.Helen Fielding, Bridget Jones's Diary (London 1997) p. 21 Even she, however, has the occasional crisis of faith, when she wonders: 'Maybe it helps if you've never read a self-help book in your life'.Fielding, Diary p. 60
In the BookWorld Companion, it is suggested that 'those of you who have tired of the glitzy world of shopping and inappropriate boyfriends in Chicklit, a trip to Dubious Lifestyle Advice might be the next step. An hour in the hallowed halls of invented ills will leave you with at least ten problems you never knew you had, let alone existed'.Jasper Fforde, One of Our Thursdays is Missing (London 2011) p. 339
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