The Politics of Self-Help

In this book, we have offered two new insights into self-help and, by extension, therapeutic culture that to date have been significant omissions in the research literature. These are, first, the transnationalisation of self-help culture, and by implication its glocal hybridisation; and, second, the tension between self-help’s discursive heterogeneity and its relative political-ideological (neoliberal) homogeneity. In developing these insights across the various chapters we have illustrated how self-help operates as a multidirectional transnational network with a dominant nodal centre in the US and UK whose reach extends far beyond the Global Northwest.