I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional: The Recovery Movement and Other Self-Help Fashions

Bound to provoke controversy, a scathing and witty look at America's obsession with self-help. In the name of individualism, Kaminer concludes, the self-help movement has created a cult of victimization in which everyone is labeled abused. But instead of offering a cure, Kaminer offers a perspective that will change the way readers think about recovery.

Kaminer takes potshots at the omnipresent 12-step self-help groups that are threatening to put psychotherapists out of work. She dismisses the rhetoric and religiosity of the programs, finds their intimacy manufactured and their emphasis on "higher power" authoritarian. TV talk shows with true confessions by commoners and celebrities further debase the New Age movement, the author contends in a funny chapter. She also takes aim at Norman Vincent Peale, Werner Erhard and Shirley MacLaine accusing them of a related "Don't Worry Be Happy" approach. Kaminer, lawyer, journalist and author of A Fearful Freedom , credibly portrays the sillier aspects of recovery groups and offers some good one-liners: "The Family that reveals together, congeals together."
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Kaminer (A Fearful Freedom, 1990, etc.) examines and deplores the latest manifestations of America's historic obsession with self-help: 12-step recovery movements, confessional talk-shows, pop-psych quick-fix books, New Age philosophy, the men's movement, and contemporary popular religious phenomena, including the evangelical movement and the writings of Rabbi Harold S. Kushner. While acknowledging that AA and Narcotics Anonymous may be genuinely helpful to people suffering from addictions, Kaminer deplores what she sees as the tendency of these and other groups to instill in their members a sense of victimization, helplessness, and dependency on a higher power. In this trend, she sees a danger to democracy and the possible menace of totalitarianism. Trying to understand the attraction that these groups hold for ever- increasing numbers, she subscribes to Abraham Maslow's theory that self-actualization has been the only way to live a meaningful life ever since the perceived collapse, after WW II, of all sources of values outside the individual. But most people find self- actualization too hard, she says, and thus the field is wide open for the self-help gurus and the authoritarian 12-step support groups. Kaminer attributes the readiness of people to claim victim- status for themselves to a widespread sense of powerlessness in modern society: ``Being recognized as a victim is at least affirming,'' she says. ``Surviving as one is heroic. When action is no longer possible, heroes are people who wait.'' Acerbic and entertaining: ``Codependency experts stress that disease is `dis-ease' with the ersatz profundity of adolescents discovering that God is dog spelled backwards.'' The omission of a discussion of typical cults (Rajneesh, Scientology, etc.) seems the only lack in an otherwise wide-ranging survey of America's perhaps dubious spiritual/moral landscape. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

If you have been purchasing some of the many recent books on codependency, 12-step programs, or recovery, you should buy this strong critique of the self-help movement. Kaminer, a lawyer and journalist, does not address the effectiveness of such programs; she explores their social implications, arguing that they encourage passivity, social isolation, and emotionality, attitudes antithetical to democracy. A distinctive and highly recommended title. For other critiques of the self-help movement, see "Alternative Titles" in "Making Room for the Recovery Boom," LJ 5/1/92, p. 49-52.--Ed.
- Mary Ann Hughes, Washington State Univ. Libs., Pullman
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.