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Sunday 18 March 2012

Bring me Cordelia! (review of "Bright-Sided")

Cover of "Bright-sided: How the Relentles...
Cover via Amazon


Positive thinking has become so integrated into the value system of our modern culture, it might seem somewhat odd to find an argument against it. And yet that is exactly what Barbara Ehrenreich does. The release of this book, which was published as “Smile or Die” in the UK has corresponded with the publication of more bold books, willing to challenge the power of positive thinking. A little while back I read Steve Salerno’s unrelenting attack on the self-help movement, “SHAM: How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless” and since then we have had “The Art of Failure: The Anti-Self Help Book” by Neel Burton. Even the great psychologist Richard Wiseman has taken positive thinking to task and looked at the real science behind self-help in “59 Seconds”, which came out the same year as “Bright-Sided”. This book was not an overt criticism of the self-help movement but rather a genuine attempt to use case studies, raw data and proven psychological methods to help people improve their lives. However, in keeping to the science Wiseman highlighted just how much of the self-help movement was bogus and even damaging. His first chapter, “Happiness”, began with a total debunking of positive thinking and revealed that far from being innocuous at worse, these techniques endorsed by the vast majority of the self-help movement could actually be harmful.