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A Hidden Agenda
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20040 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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12 / 1992 |
2,491 Words |
| Author
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James Deese
James Deese is the Hugh Scott Hamilton Professor Emeritus of
Psychology at the University of Virginia. He is the author or
coauthor of a dozen books and more than one hundred papers,
mainly on psychological topics. His last published books are
American Freedom and the Social Sciences and the fourth
edition, with E.K. Deese, of How to Study. He is currently
completing a book titled Covenants and Contracts: An Essay in
Social Psychology. |
I'M DYSFUNCTIONAL, YOU'RE DYSFUNCTIONAL
The Recovery Movement and Other Self-Help Fashions
Wendy Kaminer
Reading, Pa.: Addison-Wesley, 1992
180 pp., $ 18.95
After reading a few pages of I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional I was ready to shout, "Right on, Lady" (forgive me, Ms. Kaminer; I belong to another generation). But I read on, and my enthusiasm began to cool. By the time I had finished chapter 2, I was ready to say, "Come on, now." By the time I had finished chapter 7 I said to myself: "Not only is the author using a blunderbuss, but she is firing it off target." This was a hard judgment to arrive at, for Kaminer writes with a certain wit and a sense of the precise use of language.
Bashing the recovery experts
The author is guilty of shooting fish in a barrel, taking aim at all the twelve-step messiahs who ever essayed to tell us that we are all dysfunctional, codependent, enablers, or plain mixed up. She is after the likes of John Bradshaw, Werner Erhard (who, she is at pains to tell us, is also known as Jack Rosenberg), Melody Beattie, Ann Wilson Shaef, and the Lord knows how many others who fatten the publishers' lists with books castigating us for being in denial when we do not openly admit our psychological sickness. Those who are ever eager to set us on the road to recovery (sometimes at a fee many times the paltry royalties from books that retail for $18.95), and who infest the lowest common denominator of American TV, the talk shows.
All this bashing is fun, and it is in a great tradition. H.L. Mencken, when he was editor of The Smart Set in the early years of this century, used to write articles about the poetry of Ella Wheeler Wilcox, Edgar Guest, and the like for the amusement of Greenwich Village intellectuals. It was all a great joke with Mencken's solemn criticism of lines like "Gray clouds scudding/Milk cows cudding." But Mencken had a clear purpose as he swung his cudgel; it was to protect the language from all of the environmentally distressing assaults upon it.
Kaminer probably has a purpose, too, but it is not at all clear. True, she does like to entertain her fellow Cambridge intellectuals, but her real purpose is hidden, perhaps even from herself. I don my Freudian cap and assert that her unconscious target is
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