IDYD Ch 3: This should have been a gimme

Back to the book I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional by Wendy Kaminer.  Chapter 3 is about "Positive Thinking".

This one should have been a complete gimme.  Granted, The Secret hadn't been written yet in 1992, but there were plenty of books almost exactly like it that had been.  The problem is, as usual, IDYD's complete absence of any sense of scale.

Can we all agree that there's quite a bit of distance between clinically proven cognitive-behavioral techniques, and The Secret-styled "just think your self rich, famous, and happy" self-brainwashing?  That there is a difference between visualization of a specific procedure as a mental rehearsal in addition to physical practice (a technique which has been empirically shown to improve performance over physical practice alone), and the idea that if you just sit on your butt and "visualize" what you want hard enough, it will come to you with no other work on your part whatsoever (let me know how that works for you)?

Well, this book can't tell the difference.  In fact, it denies that techniques which have been shown to work actually do so if the author doesn't like where they've come from.  For instance, when you were in school were you advised to have a dedicated study area and a specific time when you sat down and studied?  I was, and I found it did indeed make studying easier.  I didn't get distracted by other shiny activities because this was when I always studied.  It was habit.  But Kaminer insists that suggestion is bullshit that only a fool would try because it's "Pavlovian".

Um, I'm sorry, but humans do respond to stimuli and we do form patterns and get into habits.  Have you ever been driving along a route you take often but this time actually have to take an unusual turn-off for an errand, and you just kind of zone out and miss your turn-off and then have to curse a lot and turn around, because you were on autopilot? 
Of course you haven't!  That's Pavlovian!  Only a fool would do a thing like that!

Mostly, though, this chapter is dedicated to complaining about unbelievably out of date sources and throwing the reader wildly at conclusions.  For instance:
"Don't worry, be happy.  If it is difficult to imagine many people successfully obeying Peale's orders, it is frightening to consider what might happen if they did.  If conflict avoidance is a primary goal, democracy itself is a secondary one, not to mention the justice that sometimes follows conflict resolution."

Whoa, throw on the brakes here.  How in the world did we get from "don't worry" to "avoid conflict at all costs, even that of democracy and justice itself"?  Non sequitor much?  God, when the Lion King came out two years later, her head must have just exploded.  Hakuna matata, everyone! 

Actually, the Lion King is a good example of my argument about this book's tendency to take an extreme majority opinion as though it were an extreme minority one.  I'm sure Kaminer was all "oh noes!  Look at how the Recovery Monster has invaded even children's movies with it's 'no responsibility ever, just be brainwashed' life message."  But what does Simba, and by extension the cute little kiddies in the audience, really learn?  "No worries" is fine on your average no-major-crises day and can even get you through hard situations that are beyond your control (because seriously, what exactly is a 20-lb cub supposed to do against a 400-lb beta male and a pack of hyenas?), but you can't live that way forever.  Eventually you've got to pony up and take some responsibility and do the hard crap.  Ultimately the message is not Kaminer's fantasy society's "The 'recovery movement' is right; just give up your initiative and go along with what you're told and everything will be OK", but rather actual society's "that 'recovery' stuff is crap.  You gotta grab the initiative and yank yourself up by your bootstraps."

Back to the book, though, it seems in this chapter that Kaminer does not know the definition of worry.  Early she complains: "To suggest that some personal, political, or social problems might be worth worrying about misses Peale's point."  Um, I would argue that there is not much at all worth worrying about.  There's plenty to be concerned about and to do something about.  But worrying is neither action nor planning.  "Worrying" is sitting there spinning your mental wheels, going over something over and over in your mind without actually addressing it or even logically considering how to address it.  There is nothing worth only worrying about.  If it's worth worrying about, it's worth instead using that energy and time to actually do something about or really consider what can be done.  If on the other hand, something isn't worth that useful physical or mental energy, it's certainly not worth the competely useless activity of just worrying about it.

By the way, the "Peale" she's railing about will be Norman Vincent Peale, and in particular his famous 1952 work, The Power of Positive Thinking.  She spends page after page, I'd guess at least a full third of the chapter, ripping this book apart.

Let me say that publication date again: 1952.  She's railing against a book that, at the time of her own publication, was 40 years old.  Let's look at the state of science in the 1950s:  smoking was good for you -- especially if you were pregnant, because you wanted that baby to be as small as possible when it was born; condoms could be washed out and reused; and Disney was shoving lemmings off cliffs and calling it educational.  (Lemmings don't actually commit mass suicide.)  On a psychological level, Freud's theories were in the early stages of falling out of favor, but more effective forms of pyschological therapy were 20 or more years off.

The Power of Positive Thinking may deserve a good shredding, but it's hardly an immediate problem.  Picking apart a 40-year-old book on positive thinking is a bit like picking apart one of those old medical recommendations for women to smoke while pregnant to reduce birth weight.  It's bad advice in a vacuum, but most people realize now how dated it is.  (She also fails to mention that it was considered pretty darn nutty when it was published, and Preacher Peale's professional psychologist partner started going "I am so not with him.  I didn't have anything to do with that POS" when it came out.)

She then ups that ante by spending several more pages instead complaining about Napoleon Hills Think and Get Rich, written in 1936.
::blinkblink::  Honestly!  This is the best she can do?!  She can't at least grab one of the McWilliams' books co-credited to infamous cult leader and nutjob John-Roger that were published in the late 80s/early 90s (and loved by Oprah, so she'd even get to tie in to the previous chapter), if not one of the even nuttier books I know were out there.  She honestly couldn't find anything more recent and topical than 40 to 55 years old?!?!  Geez!

Yeah, she's convincing me this "Recovery Movement" thing of hers is a new, modern, and immediately pressing problem. ::eye roll::

So, finally, last third of the book is dedicated to talking about est.  WTF is est?  est was a series of expensive "New Age awareness training seminars" which went defunct in 1984.
1984.
IDYD was written in 1992.  Again, she can't find anything more topical than a series of training seminars that could only be afforded by a small elite group and had been defunct for 8 years?

The most frustating thing about IDYD, though, is that she does have a few good points, but they're so buried under the BS.  For instance, she does point out the Big Problem with positive thinking: "There is no such thing as luck (positive thinkers don't generally believe in luck), which means that there are no hapless victims, only assholes who invite their own abuse."  Yes.  That's what a lot of us are on about with crap like The Secret; the dark side of "your thoughts literally rather than just perceptually create your reality" is that means that those in dire straits have brought it on themselves.  However, she talks about the 1952 The Power of Positive Thinking for seven straight pages, the 1936 Think and Get Rich for five pages, the defunct est program for 4 pages, and this actual real problem for 2 paragraphs.  (Hint:  Good writing would be to put this argument about the dark side of Positive Thinking at the beginning of the chapter, and then relate all later source-shredding back to it.  Bad writing would be... what we got.)

Next chapter: Support groups: evil incarnate or just whiny?