American individualism stresses individual responsibility for actions and advancement, whether getting a job and getting off welfare, learning math or surviving illness.

Government programs and cultural changes have sought to even the playing field through compensatory support, regulation of opportunities and specific interventions associated with civil rights or later rights movements. Yet, for many the responsibility for success rests with the person as autonomous agent who must learn to correct him or herself and develop survival skills. This has created a massive market for those who offer self-help, from religious institutions to physical fitness movements to Martha Stewart.

Many self-help strategies aim at concrete “improvement,” whether in vocabulary appearance (weight, hair, etc.) or social skills. Dale Carnegie’s early How to Win Friends and Influence People (15 million copies sold since 1936) grew out of public speaking classes. Self-improvements also pervade Reader’s Digest and women and men’s magazines (which may concentrate on appearance or relationships), as well as popular financial journals. Other strategies focus on making individuals feel better about themselves and problem situations (self-esteem). Self-help programs may be packaged through organizations, like Alcoholics Anonymous, through books and videos and through self-help “gurus” who market their programs via mass media.

One cannot help relating these forms to the longer spiritual traditions of revival and conversion that have shaped American evangelical religion since colonial days. By the twentieth century these great awakenings had become Pentecostal meetings and tent revivals and then radio and television programs promising salvation in return for commitment and belief. Indeed, Christian media met self-help in Rev. Norman Vincent Peale’s Power of Positive Thinking (1952). In the 1960s, psychologically based groups like Esalen Institute were accused of neo-religious dimensions as well. Cultish overtones are not distant from the fervent witness of self-help infomercials and rallies. Advice columnists, magazines and etiquette books also have offered continuing guidance on selfimprovement and manipulation of images, whether to early immigrants or to upwardly mobile suburbanites after the Second World War. These betray American status anxiety when about the hidden issues of class—self-improvement can be extremely otherdirected in terms of standards or competition for resources.

Since the 1980s, self-help/self-esteem has represented a major industry, starting in the classroom and continuing through adulthood, while identifying widespread areas of change and uncertainty Many books are directed towards women and women’s assertions—cf. John Gray’s bestseller Men are From Mars, Women are from Venus (1993)—as well as love and romance; others deal also with image and health. Writing tends to mix vaguely Christian platitudes with pep talks and psychologistic data. Wit and nostalgia are also selling points in series like Canfield and Hansen’s Chicken Soup for the Soul/Child, etc., which became a television feature, or Robert Fulghum’s works. Still other works, like Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (1989), deal with organizational and workplace issues. Some prove much more blunt in their promises, like Gray’s How to Get What You Want and Want What You Have (1992).

Series and authors as celebrities are linked, in turn, to counseling, rallies and conventions.

Catchy titles, while effective in marketing, also make these works easy targets for satire; Saturday Night Live has continually taunted “feel-good” stylemakers, while the sitcom Frasier has raised many questions about “pop” psychology. Yet mass media also promise better lives, thus creating anxiety and appealing to self-help solutions. In fact, stars also become caught up in crossover promotions of couples therapy (John Tesh), psychic friends (Dionne Warwick) and other self-help strategies. Hence, the outlines of the American dream and nightmares of failure become blurred and disquieting.