— Musings —08.07.2018 05:24 PM
This kind of deep thinking is why you guys keep me around
If self-help books worked, they wouldn’t need to print so many self-help books.
— Warren Kinsella (@kinsellawarren) August 7, 2018
— Musings —08.07.2018 05:24 PM
If self-help books worked, they wouldn’t need to print so many self-help books.
— Warren Kinsella (@kinsellawarren) August 7, 2018
Unfortunately, so many need self-help . . . the market’s growing.
Self-help books don’t “work”, they comfort and sometimes offer insights into personal unhappiness. A hundred years ago, bookstore shelves groaned under the weight of inspirational religious tracts. Self-help books are the modern secular counterpart.
RE: Peter says:
August 8, 2018 at 6:46 am
“Self-help books don’t “work”, . . .”
Don’t ‘work’ for who? I wish I had Tony Robbins money . . .
The Bible was the first self-help book and then Freud wrote Studies in Hysteria 1886 to launch modern day Psychoanalysis. The Cognitive School of Experimental Psychology threw out Psychoanalysis & self-help in favour of Theories of Cognition & Learning. The Behavioural School opts for that which is observable and they hold out no hope for that which is subjective or objectively unobservable. Self-help is unscientific in approach and that’s why introverts like it and read it.
RW
Self-help is unscientific in approach
Would you say that’s a bug or a feature?
If one emanates from the Existential School of Experimental Psychology it is a feature, but if any other school it is a bug.
Freud used ‘Free Association’ as a technique to make the ‘patient’ succumb to authority of Medicine and cough up what is, or might be bothering them. Existential Psychiatry does something similar to Self Help in terms of starting out from a point of origin on a quest for knowledge that is introspective, and often anecdotally based on the lives of those that choose to read such material. In other words, most Self Help is self-selected by novice individuals that have never studied Experimental Psychology so that they have only a rudimentary understanding of what drives them as persons to select what they read to ‘improve’ their lives & relationships. Women focus much more on relationships and self-select Self Help based upon that alone. Men don’t generally read Self Help at all unless they are Metrosexual types and they drink latte at $8 bucks a pop. The rough-&-tough manly man is too tough to read so they just drink their problems over until they pass out. Often the manly man types will repeat the process until their livers give out or they get some other problem from drinking like dementia and then they atrophy instead of reading a book. Point being that the Self Help types at least attempt to help themselves whilst the rough & tumble manly man types merely end up in diapers with drool dripping from their mouths.
RW
Actually, the same could be said of diets and diet books. If they worked, there would be a new one every year.
I meant – there would NOT be a new one every year. Sorry.