Celebrity Personas, Self-help Culture, and Collective Psychology: Reflections and transformations

The self-help industry bombards us with books and messages about how to live happier lives, but their advice is not always helpful. Celebrity endorsements of self-help methods and mythologies in popular culture create communicative tensions in our collective psyche, feeding messages of hope and opti...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Darren Kelsey
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Deakin University 2020-12-01
Series:Persona Studies
Online Access:https://ojs.deakin.edu.au/index.php/ps/article/view/995
Description
Summary:The self-help industry bombards us with books and messages about how to live happier lives, but their advice is not always helpful. Celebrity endorsements of self-help methods and mythologies in popular culture create communicative tensions in our collective psyche, feeding messages of hope and optimism that are often, somewhat ironically, detrimental to our happiness. As a result, we now have a growing body of anti-self-help literature telling us to ditch the positive thinking, cut the endless fixation on goal setting, and live more resiliently in the face of life’s inevitable adversity (Brown 2016; Manson 2016; Brinkmann 2017).
ISSN:2205-5258