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A Hidden Agenda |
| Section: BOOK WORLD / REVIEWS |
| Author: James Deese |
| Publication:
The World & I Online |
| Issue Date: 12/1/1992 |
| Size: 2,491 Words, 14,445 Characters |
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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...
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... had addressed herself to the central issues of the moral and psychological problems of our time. I commend her for standing up for the concept of the will, but she really needs to meditate upon its significance. We live in an age of psychological causes. Kaminer's book suffers mainly because, as Gertrude Stein was reputed to have said about Oakland, California, "There is no there there." vbcrlf
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Publication Details
(The World & I Online) |
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The World & I Online is a
comprehensive academic resource that encompasses a broad range of
articles by scholars and experts in the areas of Global Studies,
Liberal Arts, Fine & Applied Arts, General Science, and Spanish.
Originally published monthly in print as The World & I, our site
includes the complete contents since 1986 and continues to publish
a new issue online each month. |
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