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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
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 often draw, horizontal peer-support and validation is thus offered the reader through its tone as well as support from the author.
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 has been a significant shift in the meaning of "self-help" to a largely individual undertaking'.McGee, p. 18-19
The other result of the loss of 'Max Weber's "traditional behavior...everyday action to which people have become habitually accustomed"'Alfred Schutz, The Phenomenology of the Social World (Illinois 1997) p. 197 is an increased social pressure for Self-fashioning: 'while one's identity might have been formerly anchored in (and limited by) a community...the self-creating self must create a written narrative of his or her life'.McGee, p. 157 self-help books 'written and read for the purpose of helping people build a personal philosophy'Dolby, p. 79 contribute to that end.
The danger may arise however of an overestimation of the possibilities of change, given that 'we do not in any meaningful sense intend or choose our birth, our parents, our bodies, our language, our culture, our thoughts, our dreams, our desires, our death, and so on'.Adam Phillips, On Flirtation (London 1994) p. 9 In the PsyBlog-Understand Your Mind , Dr. Jeremy Dean states that "the dark side of hope is that claims about potential improvement can, and are, grossly exaggerated, in order to prise open our wallets. Similarly a bright and breezy approach to potential change may lead us to believe that changing ourselves is easy, when often it requires considerable, sometimes monumental, effort".Jeremy Dean, "Is Modern Self-Help Just a Massive Money-Making Scam?", PsyBlog-Understand Your Mind, 2008. Retrieved 12 April 2015. Even when self-help books offer realistic advice, they are usually not something the reader does not already know (i.e. eat less to lose weight). The 'Twelve-step "Traditions"...have fostered a notion of individual self-mastery or self-control as limited...use of the Serenity Prayer encourages individuals to accept what they cannot change, to find courage to change what they can change, and to seek wisdom in discerning the difference'.McGee, p. 186 and p. 240 Self-help books will indeed often acknowledge formally that 'this book does not replace the need for therapy and counselling for troubled relationships or survivors of a dysfunctional family'.John Gray, Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus (London 1993) p. 7 In practice however, fueled by competitive advertising, often 'such books hold out to the reader the promise of a virtually "instantaneous" transformation';Mel D.Faber, New Age Thinking (Ottawa 1996) p. 350 and there ensues something of a 'built-in contradiction of the celebratory arc of the self-help book combined with the stubborn realities'Davis, p. 231-2 of the human world.
The reader may go away disillusioned; or may seek for the answer in the next book, so that 'self-help books can become an addiction in and of themselves'J. and L. Fried, Adult Children (1988) p. vii – a process that will 'have fostered the belabored self'McGee, p. 176 rather than relieving it. In that perspective, since all self-help books 'have at least one common message. They tell you that you have the power to change yourself....By implication all of these books are saying, if you are in pain, if you are stuck and can't seem to change, it's no one's fault but your own'.P. R. McGraw, It's Not Your Fault (2004) p. 5
It is important to note that the popularity of self-help books may cause a placebo effect and thus appear to be an effective way to change an individual's way of thinking about their life and selves. This is because individuals will believe these books will change their lives like others have endorsed.
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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