2 :: THE REINVENTION OF PERSONS
THE SEDUCTIONS OF SELF-HELP
These days, when we are not being bombarded with advertising and promotions for
the reinvention of self, we are being told that the self is a site for endless improvement.
Once again, the psychological sciences figure prominently in this cultural underwriting
of the arts of self-improvement. Psychoanalysis, psychotherapy and related discourses
of self-investigation loom large in contemporary mappings of our relationship to
ourselves. In an age which dethrones the power of expert knowledge, however, the
role of therapist has been largely outsourced, passed over to the actual customers of
self-improvement and self-reinvention. In this shift from expert (therapist) to customer
(patient), we find the commercial logics of do-it-yourself. Enter the self-improvement
industry, inclusive of everything from 12-step recovery programmes to life coaching,
and its dazzling techniques for “self-help”.
From one angle, the rise of self-help represents the contemporary search for balance
between secure self-identity on the one hand and experimental reinvention on the
other. It is a feature of global capitalism that advancement, progress and the future
are all represented as more or less synonymous with a complete break from the past;
the established patterns of custom, habit or routine are of apparently little value for
contemplating the novel challenges and risks of tomorrow, let alone those of the day
after. The modern age instead delivers choice, and as never before. We cherish choice
as promotional of self-flourishing and freedom, while believing we are free agents
capable of making autonomous choices among an indefinite range of possible goods
and services. Ironically, this very complex diversity of choices – a world in which there
is no choice but to choose – confronts the individual as overwhelming. And it is this
cultural contradiction from which the launching of self-help proceeds.
The genre of self-help literature, the explosive popularity of which has served to bolster
an otherwise faltering publishing industry, fulfils various reinvention functions. To begin
with, self-help literature is a kind of overall lifestyle reinvention, largely dismissive of
the past (even when proclaiming its importance) and in love with the prospect of future
possibilities. 32 The reinvention of persons All that was past – family upbringing,
childhood experiences, significant intimate relationships, established cognitive frames
of reference – transforms to an “open future”. In this sense, the genre of self-help
underwrites the changeability of persons and things. The literature of self-help, broadly
speaking, proclaims that identities can be shucked off, recast, other identities tried on
for size and then profligately performed throughout the theatres of social life until such
time as the self ’s identity demands further reshuffling. In the midst of a world of
perpetual global change, the genre of self-help reassuringly consoles of the availability
of potential alternative lives and lifestyles.