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1 Transnational Popular Psychology and the Global Self-Help Industry is the book we have all been waiting for: Nehring and his co-authors chart the globalisation of self-help culture from the US and the UK, to China, Mexico, Trinidad, and Tobago, capturing the hybridisation of the form and the spread of therapeutic cultures and neoliberal ideology across the globe. While most studies of self-help culture to date have focused on the genre s prevalence in the Anglophone world, chiefly the US and the UK, Transnational Self-Help reveals just how prevalent the propaganda of entrepreneurial self-improvement has become. For students and scholars of popular culture, cultural studies, global studies, psychology and psychiatry, this is a must read. Micki McGee, PhD author, Self-Help, Inc: Makeover Culture in American Life Associate Professor of Sociology and American Studies, Fordham University, USA Exploring the place of self-help books in contemporary culture, Nehring, Alvarado, Hendriks and Kerrigan provide a fascinating transnational perspective on the therapeutic culture industry. The critical-cultural approach employed by the authors pulls the curtain back on the self-help genre s underlying discourse of neoliberal entrepreneurialism and the freedom of the market, articulated through reoccurring tropes of survivalism, self-affirmation and boot-strap individualism. As they convincingly demonstrate through excellent cases studies from around the world, self-help books operate through an assumption that attitudes, not social-structural constraints, determine upward social mobility, exposing the political dimension of self-help culture. Given its interpretive depth and the insights provided across cultures, this book should be on the reading list of anyone interested in how public discourse shapes ideas about the self and social relationships in an age of diminishing opportunities. Patrick D. Murphy, PhD Associate Dean for Research & Graduate Studies School of Media & Communication Temple University, USA Over the course of the past several years, scholarly attention to self-help literature has tied the popularity of this genre to the abstract trajectories of Western modernising processes. Attending to the existential or ontological shocks of reflexive modernity and the diminishment of social capital, self-help is the bandaid these societal structures offer to the listless denizens of the Anglosphere. Transnational Popular Psychology and the Global Self-Help Industry adds valuable and much-needed perspective to this view through a rich account of the specific global contexts of self-help s production, distribution and consumption. Through sustained inquiry and nuanced ethnography, the authors draw out the situated meanings of self-help within particular national cultures from China, Mexico and Trinidad to the US and UK, and the varied hybrid and glocal forms such literatures take in these contexts. Both readable and intellectually provocative, this book captures self-help in its specificity, while drawing it together around more the practical and situated effects of neoliberalism, and it s invocation to personal enterprise. This book will likely open important new doors not just for scholarly approaches to self-help, but for more general understandings of globalisation, neoliberalism and the production of the self. Sam Binkley, PhD Associate Professor of Sociology Emerson College, USA

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3 Transnational Popular Psychology and the Global Self-Help Industry The Politics of Contemporary Social Change Daniel Nehring Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Worcester, UK Emmanuel Alvarado Professor of Spanish and Hispanic Studies, Palm Beach State College, USA Eric C. Hendriks Postdoctoral Researcher, Peking University, China Dylan Kerrigan Lecturer in Anthropology and Political Sociology, The University of the West Indies, Trinidad and Tobago palgrave macmillan

4 Daniel Nehring, Emmanuel Alvarado, Eric C. Hendriks and Dylan Kerrigan 2016 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6 10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act First published 2016 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number , of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave and Macmillan are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN ISBN ( ebook) DOI / This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Nehring, Daniel, author. Transnational popular psychology and the global self-help industry : the politics of contemporary social change / Daniel Nehring, Emmanuel Alvarado, Eric C. Hendriks, Dylan Kerrigan. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Psychology, Applied History. 2. Psychology, Applied Cross-cultural studies. 3. Self-help techniques Cross-cultural studies. I. Title. BF636.N dc

5 For Hyunju DN To my family for always giving me the support I need to pursue new and challenging endeavours EA To Prof. Martin Riesebrodt ( ), a brilliant Weberian who taught me about cults and Heilsversprechen ECH For Hunter DK

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7 Contents List of Tables and Figures Acknowledgements About the Authors ix x xi 1 Self-Help Worlds 1 How to survive 1 What are self-help books? 6 Exploring self-help 8 Structure of the book 12 2 Self-Help and Society 17 Why does self-help matter? 17 Self-made men 20 The self in the marketplace 25 3 Self-Help s Transnationalisation 30 Towards a transnational perspective on therapeutic culture 30 Publishing statistics: size and scale 34 Publishing statistics: growth trends and composition 38 A transnational self-help entrepreneur 45 How is self-help transnational? 52 4 Self-Help Entrepreneurs in China 54 The rise of self-help in China 54 Mental life and social change in Chinese society 55 China s glocalised self-help field 58 Self-help in Chinese culture and public life 65 Transnational self-help in contemporary China 72 5 Self-Help in Crisis 75 Self-help in an age of diminishing opportunities 75 Feel-good books in an age of crisis: Mainstream self-help today 79 Self-help dystopias: Opting out and getting by 85 vii

8 viii Contents Truth in the marketplace 91 No crisis: Self-help in the Anglosphere 98 6 Cultural Struggles, Intimate Life and Transnational Narratives 101 Self-help in Latin America 101 Self-help and intimate life in Mexico 103 Conservative-patriarchal relationships in Mexican self-help 106 Plurality, individual choice and intimate life 112 The self, intimate life and transnational self-help The Uses of Self-Help Books in Trinidad 123 Self-help narratives and their readers 123 Self-help guides in Western Trinidad 125 The bookstores 125 Where do you find out about self-help guides? 129 Readership 133 It was spiritual and practical at the same time 135 Preparedness and the new survivalist 137 Consumption 139 A culture of self-help in Western Trinidad 140 Transnational self-help in Trinidad 142 Conclusion The Politics of Self-Help 152 Self-help matters 152 Transnational self-help 154 Thin selves 158 The political implications of self-help 163 Final thoughts 167 Notes 171 References 174 Index 191

9 Tables and Figures Tables 3.1 Sales of self-help books in Mexico, Production of self-help books in Mexico, Sales value of self-help books in the United States, Sales of self-help books in the United Kingdom, Sales of self-help books in India, Sales of self-help books in South Africa, Bestseller rankings of Napoleon Hill s Think and Grow Rich Bestseller rankings of Stephen Covey s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People Annual sales of self-help books by Paul McKenna, 2006 and Figures 3.1 Percentage of US titles among top self-help bestsellers Origin of top-ten self-help bestsellers in China. 59 ix

10 Acknowledgements Daniel Nehring: I would like to thank my colleagues at the University of Worcester for an inspiring environment that contributed greatly to the final stages of my work on this book. Likewise, I thank the Department of Global Studies at Pusan National University for its support during the earlier stages of my research into transnational self-help culture. My coauthors added invaluable insights to this book, and I am profoundly grateful for the discussions we had throughout our collaboration. The Economic and Social Research Council funded the very early stages of this study, and I would like to acknowledge its support. Finally, and most importantly, I would like to thank Ryu Hyunju for her support and encouragement; these made a big difference. Emmanuel Alvarado: I would like to thank the students, faculty and leadership at Palm Beach State College for fostering an environment which promotes teaching, learning, and academic enquiry. I would especially like to thank Joanne Cameron who provided invaluable assistance in the research needed to produce this work. I also remain very thankful to my friend Lewis Jaimes for his assistance in developing and revising some of the central ideas of this book. Eric C. Hendriks: I would like to thank Leng Anqi of the Toulouse School of Economics who helped me with my case study of China. Professor Anthony Fung (Chinese University of Hong Kong) and Professor Won Jaeyoun (Yonsei University) provided feedback on my interpretations of Chinese public culture. Finally, I am grateful for the research scholarships provided by the FAZIT foundation and the state Baden-Württemberg in Germany which allowed me to start my empirical research in China in In 2014 and early 2015, while working on the present book, I was supported by the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. Dylan Kerrigan: I would like to thank my research assistant Allyce Woodhouse for her great support in the collection of data, and also the readers and purchasers of self-help guides and recordings in Western Trinidad who gave up their time to be interviewed for this book. I would also like to thank Elizabeth Darwish, who was my initial gatekeeper into the world of mutual aid sessions and self-help more generally in Trinidad. x

11 About the Authors Daniel Nehring is currently Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Worcester, UK. He has previously worked at Pusan National University, South Korea. Over the past ten years, he has done extensive research on transnational self-help cultures. Recent publications include Sociology (2013) and Intimacies and Cultural Change (2014, with Emmanuel Alvarado and Rosario Esteinou). Emmanuel Alvarado is Professor of Spanish and Hispanic Studies at Palm Beach State College in Florida, USA. His research concerns experiences of intimate citizenship among Mexican-Americans and Mexican immigrants in the USA. Recent publications include Intimacies and Cultural Change (2014, with Daniel Nehring and Rosario Esteinou). Eric C. Hendriks is Postdoctoral Researcher in the Sociology Department of Peking University, Beijing, China. He investigates the globalisation of self-help culture and conducted fieldwork in Germany and China. In 2015, he published the book Knowledge Wars: The Global Competition between Self-Help Gurus and Institutional Authorities. Dylan Kerrigan is Lecturer in Anthropology and Political Sociology at the University of the West Indies, St Augustine Campus. His work explores the relationship between culture and power. He is currently developing a manuscript on the Militarisation and Insecurity of Everyday Life in the Caribbean. xi

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