Optimizing The Self
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Optimizing the Self
This book provides an analysis of the social representations of leading self-help genres, including neurolinguistic programming, cognitive self-help therapy, mindfulness, self-management, self-esteem, self-leadership and self-control. Exploring the globalised therapeutic culture of today, the book argues that psychology as ‘science’ is often abandoned to aid the individual pursuit for self-realization and self-optimization. Opposing the view that self-help culture is external to psychology, Madsen argues that it is firmly embedded within psychology, playing an important role in people’s lives. Each chapter traces and critically interprets a range of self-help philosophies and techniques, examining the claims of self-help literature to represent the most innovative psychological, medical or neurobiological research. Discussing each genre in turn, chapters examine key research alongside self-help literature to explore the effectiveness and impact of leading self-help genres in various social contexts and environments. The book offers a contemporary critical overview of issues concerning self-help, combining critical psychology with the theory of social representation to provide a broad perspective on self-help as a valid psychology. Optimizing the Self will be of interest to academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of social representation, critical and cultural psychology and theory, clinical psychology, and the sociology of culture and science. The book will also be of use to critical and cultural psychologists and theorists, as well as clinical psychologists.
Self-Optimization in Modernist Culture
Our contemporary society is obsessed with the idea of self-optimization, a concept that implies the need to constantly work on improving oneself and one’s appearance. The roots of postmodern self-optimization, however, lie in the cultural industries that emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With its equally profound and transient interest in new forms of expression, new ways of life, and new technologies, modernism thoroughly and critically embraced the idea of the self as something that can be created and recreated, either in accordance with or in contradiction to social norms. This book explores strategies of self-optimization developed in modernist literature and culture. In doing so, it offers a panoramic view of an often-overlooked aspect of European and North American modernity that anticipates our current postmodern crisis of the self.
The Best You: The Politics of Self Optimization
Do you know what negative liberty is? It's when the powers-that-be say, "Solve your own problems. Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. Don't expect us to help you. Make your own way in life. Succeed in a system that was never designed for YOU to succeed, but for those that run the system. US. The In Crowd. The Inner Circle. Our success is guaranteed. It's baked in. Why would we care about you? You're not one of us. You're not part of our family. You're not one of our friends or cronies. There are only a few good jobs in the world, and we've reserved them all. That's the entire point of the system. Sheez, haven't you worked that out yet? Dumb asses." Wouldn't you rather live in a positive liberty system where the whole point of the State is to ensure you get everything you need to make the most of yourself, to maximize your potential, to be the best you? What is the best world? It's the world where every person is the best version of themselves.