Authentic Self, Paranoid Critique and Getting a Good Night's Rest

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Notes

[1] I say ‘roughly’ because the distinction between the ‘changers’ and those which advocate authenticity is not clear cut. Many texts, including Ban Breathnach's, draw to varying degrees on both scripts. Rosalind Coward has noticed this previously, writing of how even in those texts which advocate changing oneself, its generally the case that the

idea of the person as process is not an idea of a person in perpetual process whose identity is never fixed … Instead, this notion of fluidity is about becoming in the sense of realizing a potential or essence, which already exists but has been denied. (Coward, 1989, p. 99)

‘Changers’ are a group in so far as they, like those texts which seek to resolve a specific problem, are less interested than are those advocating authenticity in articulating a particular model of the self and making it the basis for their programme. The difference is one of degree rather than absolute.

[2] Important, though far from exhaustive, examples of these are Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (1991), Martin Seligman's Authentic Happiness (2002), and Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander's The Art of Possibility: Transforming Professional and Personal Life (2002).

[3] For ease, throughout the remainder of this paper, ‘self-help’ should be understood as referring specifically to this kind of text.

[4] For further examples of this kind of text, see Moore (1994), Black and Drozd (1995), Garth (1996), Chopra (1996), Hillman (1996), Ban Breathnach (1999), McGraw (2001), Jeffers (2001), Tolle (2002), and Burns and van der Fluit (2002). Each of these popular authors relies on an idea that authentic relation to true or real self is the basis for a happy life well lived.

[5] Simple Abundance has no page numbers. Instead, it is divided according to the days of the year on which each particular passage is to be read.

[6] Simple Abundance's interpellation of a melancholic reader invites its interpretation through Judith Butler's idea of the central place of melancholy in the acquisition of gender identity (Butler, 1999, pp. 73–84, 1997, pp. 132–150). Sigmund Freud provides the ground for that idea in his description of how, for the sufferer of melancholia, ‘an object which was lost has been reinstated within the ego; that is, that an object cathexis has been replaced with an identification’ (Freud, 1950, p. 35). For Freud, this ‘points to the conclusion that the character of the ego is a precipitate of abandoned object-cathexes and that it contains a record of past object choices’ (Freud, 1950, p. 36). Butler describes the operations of heterosexuality as structured by abandoned love for same-sexed objects. She argues that the taboo on homosexuality requires that abandonment and, because the lost object was prohibited anyway, that loss cannot be grieved (Butler, 1999, p. 81, 1997, p. 147). Unable to be grieved, the loss is instead refused as a complete loss by a process of melancholic identification, preserving the lost object as part of the ego (Butler, 1997, p. 134). There are clear resonances of this in the way that Simple Abundance encourages the reader to overcome her melancholia by imagining within herself a companionable other who is her authentic self. Early on in Simple Abundance, the reader gets the ‘good news’ that

even if you have ignored her overtures for decades … your authentic self has not abandoned you. Instead she has been waiting patiently for you to recognize her and reconnect. (Ban Breathnach, 1996, January 5)

Later, in a description that sounds a great deal like dating, Ban Breathnach asks:

Now that you've met your authentic self, wouldn't you like to get to know her better? You can when you start going on creative excursions together … When you embark on creative excursions, your authentic self will lovingly reveal to you the beautiful mystery that is you. (Ban Breathnach, 1996, February 1)

Later on in Simple Abundance, the reader will find that the place for a woman to become her authentic self is the home, and authenticating activities are organized around the performance of domestic activities and the care for husband and children. A Butlerian interpretation here would understand melancholia not as indicative of a need for becoming authentic but as ‘part of the operation of regulatory power …, a form of containment, a way of internalizing an attachment that is barred from the world’ (Butler, 1997, p. 143). That would be a relevant and necessary ‘paranoid’ critique of self-help, one that might eventually express what Butler calls the ‘radical uninhabitablility’ of any gendered idealization (Butler, 1997, p. 145). This paper, however, takes a different approach, attempting to imagine how the analysis of self-help might draw out another mode of critique structured around the never-the-less necessity of the habitation of something.

[7] Murphy, however, quite rightly sees this proximity as also a strategic possibility for active feminist engagement with the genre (Murphy, 2001, p. 161).

[8] Ban Breathnach's Website (www.simpleabundance.com), for example, notes that Simple Abundance has sold over seven million copies in the United States alone and has been reprinted at least 56 times. A different indication of the cultural reach of such texts, identified both by Parkins and Brabazon in their introduction (Parkins & Brabazon, 2001, pp. 141–142) as well as by Kylie Murphy (Murphy, 2001, pp. 160–161), is that John Gray's terminology for describing gender difference and relationships has been thoroughly absorbed into the popular lexicon.

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Notes on contributors

Will Tregoning

William Tregoning is a PhD candidate in the Gender Studies Department at the University of Sydney. His thesis analyses the critical implications of the persistent popular attachment to the idea of the authentic self.