Self help messiah, p.29
Self-help Messiah, page 29
Neo-Freudians (or more accurately, perhaps, neo-Adlerians) such as Horney and Sullivan shaped an intellectual atmosphere in the 1930s where a psychology of interpersonal relations, socially rooted personality development, adjustment mechanisms, and self-esteem assumed a central position. Horney and Sullivan stressed, in the words of one observer, “the techniques by which the individual might better adapt to his environment, the channels through which eccentric or abnormal behavior could flow into more manageable patterns of behavior.” This position gained reinforcement from other intellectual directions as well. Proponents of “ego psychology,” such as Heinz Hartmann, presented the ego as the most prominent factor in personality development: a powerful, resilient agent of reason and control with an “ability to adapt and thereby master the external world.” The “culture and personality” school of anthropology also lent support through figures such as Ruth Benedict. “The life-history of the individual is first and foremost an accommodation to the patterns and standards traditionally handed down in his community,” she wrote in her influential Patterns of Culture (1934). “From the moment of his birth the customs into which he is born shape his experiences and behavior.” Industrial psychologists such as Elton Mayo urged corporate managers to utilize psychological techniques to help workers reconcile themselves to the demands of modern industrial organization. With a common emphasis on adjusting to social demands and cultural expectation, all of these arguments dovetailed with the neo-Freudian position.37
Carnegie, of course, was no intellectual and there is no evidence that he read Horney or Sullivan, Hartmann or Benedict or Mayo, although he did dip into Adler’s work. As always, however, he remained remarkably sensitive to his cultural milieu, and adjustment psychology was in the air. Personifying a linkage between highbrow theory and popular expression, Carnegie became conversant with this movement through interpreters such as Overstreet, Link, and Payne and created an accessible version of it in How to Win Friends and Influence People. A popular psychologist par excellence, he mixed elements of adjustment psychology—adapt to your social environment, develop interpersonal relations, hone your personal skills—into a new concoction promising happiness and success to millions of Americans.38
Adjustment psychology provided much of the basis for Carnegie’s recommendation that individuals should enhance their personalities. He approvingly cited Adler’s assertion that it is “the individual who is not interested in his fellow man who has the greatest difficulties in life.” He praised his associate Link as an inspiration for those who “want to develop a more pleasing personality” to deal with others. Carnegie conveyed a host of techniques for shaping an attractive personal image—smile, have a positive attitude, be interested in the other person’s interests, be a good listener—that were rooted in social interaction. Clearly, the sparkling personality of Carnegie’s successful striver that allowed him to fit in, make friends, maneuver skillfully through a web of social demands, and find economic success had roots in the adjustment-psychology ethos of the 1930s.39
Adjustment psychology also informed Carnegie’s view of those upon whom the striving individual acted: discovering what they wanted, meeting their needs, quenching their desires, and bolstering their self-esteem. He turned to Overstreet’s “illuminating book, Influencing Human Behavior,” for “the best piece of advice which can be given to would-be persuaders, whether in business, in the home, in schools, in politics: first, arouse in the other person an eager want. He who can do this has the whole world with him. He who cannot walks a lonely way.” He summoned associate Arthur Gates, who declared in his Educational Psychology, “Sympathy the human species universally craves.” Carnegie cited Sigmund Freud, John Dewey, and William James on the human yearning to feel important, and concluded, “We nourish the bodies of our children and friends and employees; but how seldom we nourish their self-esteem. We provide them with roast beef and potatoes to build energy; but we neglect to give them kind words of appreciation that would sing in their memories for years to come like the music of the morning stars.”40
This entire panorama of needs and impulses created a process of psychological adjustment that Carnegie labeled “human relations.” Getting along with others, winning friends, and influencing people demanded sensitivity to the psychological yearning for self-esteem and security, apropos of the Adler-Horney-Sullivan school. How to Win Friends and Influence People was larded with psychologically tinged counseling tips on “How to Make People Like You Instantly,” “How to Get Cooperation,” “A Quick Way to Make Everybody Happy,” and “the fine art of making friends out of enemies.” Carnegie admonished, “We like to be consulted about our wishes, our wants, our thoughts,” and instructed, “Let the other fellow feel that the idea is his.” Carnegie’s popular psychology of human relations was summed up in his sentimental recollection of a boyhood pet, Tippy the dog. “You never read a book on psychology, Tippy. You didn’t need to,” he wrote. “You knew by some divine instinct that one can make more friends in two months by becoming genuinely interested in other people than one can in two years by trying to get other people interested in him.”41
In the final analysis, however, Carnegie was most interested in applied psychology. Above all, he sought the practical application of psychological principles to help success seekers adapt to modern bureaucratic life, learn to manipulate it, and prosper. Thus he identified the “yes-response” as the crucial psychological technique for handling people effectively. Carnegie’s entire program of praising, bolstering, and encouraging others was aimed at triggering a positive “welcoming in” response from them. As Overstreet argued in Influencing Human Behavior—Carnegie quoted it at length—the individual who handles others skillfully “gets at the outset a number of ‘yes-responses.’ He has thereby set the psychological processes of his listeners moving in the affirmative direction … The organism is on a forward-moving, accepting, open attitude. Hence the more ‘yeses’ we can, at the very outset, induce, the more likely we are to succeed in capturing attention for our ultimate proposal.” Those who confront others and try to argue their way to influence and success nearly always fail. They are, Carnegie wrote, “psychologically stupid.”42
Ultimately, of course, the adjustment psychology popularized in Carnegie’s book and propounded in elevated intellectual circles by the neo-Freudians, gained much of its popular appeal from the social and economic trauma of the 1930s. Its creation of widespread personal shame and guilt among the middle class created a sympathetic audience for a psychological ethos of interpersonal relations, security and belonging, and enhanced self-esteem. One might think of this period as the “Age of Adler,” historian Warren I. Susman has suggested. “[T]he effort appears to be—both in popular psychology and in the rising schools of professional analysis—to find some way for individual adjustment, for overcoming shame and fear—perhaps Adler’s ‘inferiority complex’—by adopting a life-style that enables one to fit in, to belong, to identify.”43
As the exploding sales of How to Win Friends and Influence People clearly indicated, Carnegie had put his finger squarely on America’s psychological pulse during the painful days of the Great Depression. The soothing allure of adjustment psychology in his book attracted millions of anxiety-ridden readers struggling to survive, both financially and emotionally. But the psychological qualities of this best-selling text also had a longer-term impact. They made it a key development in the creation of America’s modern therapeutic culture.
By the 1930s, the Dale Carnegie Course in Effective Speaking was promising a challenging emotional experience for its participants. Interactions with and criticisms from one’s fellow students would aid in learning to project a compelling personality to others. According to a promotional pamphlet, Session Eleven, for example, would help students see themselves through others’ eyes. “When your turn comes, you will stand up before the audience, but you won’t make a talk—you will listen while other people talk about you and the impression you make on them. They will praise your good points and they will tell you very gently but honestly of faults you ought to eradicate and how to make your personality more appealing,” it explained. “Everyone will be urged to be absolutely frank, and to reveal his innermost thoughts about you.”44
Ultimately, happy results awaited those who completed the journey, as copious testimonials from Carnegie Course graduates attested. Throughout the 1930s, Carnegie hosted promotional meetings for his courses that featured fifteen to twenty recent graduates who followed one another across the stage and testified to the life-changing impact of the principles they learned. “Their speeches suggested the ‘confessions’ that sinners give at revival meetings after they have been saved,” reported one newspaper. A typical testimonial came from a forty-year-old salesman with a family who, by his own account, was “suffering from an inferiority complex” that was “eating his heart out.” Frightened of dealing with others, he walked up and down in front of an office half a dozen times before he could summon enough courage to open the door. He had become so discouraged that he was thinking of working in a machine shop. But after taking the Carnegie Course, “he lost all fear of audiences and individuals,” his income began to soar, and he became “one of the star salesmen in New York City.”45
A writer from The New Yorker heard similar sentiments when he visited a Carnegie course for a feature story in 1937. Students were asked to explain why they had taken the course, and feelings of emotional inadequacy often surfaced. One man confessed, “when I went to college something terrible got hold of me—an inferiority complex. I still got it, too. I can’t go out with a crowd of folks without getting scared.” Another student spoke similarly: “I’ve got an awful inferiority complex, really, and I want to overcome it.” Once again, however, according to The New Yorker, course graduates promised success in surmounting such psychological hurdles. “Mr. Carnegie infuses courage into the most timid and backward men so that they undertake and achieve things that surprise them,” wrote one. Said another, “It is not exaggeration to state that this course marked a definite turning point in my life.” One student said simply, “I owe everything that I count as a success in my entire life to Dale Carnegie’s teachings in human relations.” For a middle-aged man who read How to Win Friends and Influence People and then took the course, the only regret was that he came to the program so late. In his rueful words, “If I had read this book ten years ago I would be better off today, mentally, physically, and financially.”46
The emotional process at work in the Carnegie course—confessing vulnerability, confronting weakness, seeking emotional growth, pursuing personal self-improvement—displayed all the hallmarks of a new therapeutic mind-set taking shape in modern America. In the aftermath of an older Victorian creed of tight-lipped self-control and upright moral character, modern Americans increasingly embraced a new value system dedicated to emotional self-fulfillment and sparkling personality. And a key part of this new orientation, as historian T. J. Jackson Lears has described, was a worldview emphasizing “self-realization in the world—an ethos characterized by an almost obsessive concern with psychic and physical health defined in sweeping terms.”47
In this powerful new cultural paradigm, several concerns predominated. Psychologized readings of human nature led modern individuals to develop an “intense preoccupation with the self,” as Christopher Lasch termed this tendency. Mental health, “the modern equivalent of salvation,” became the overarching goal as therapists and counselors took their stations as new guides to happiness, peace of mind, and success. In fact, the pursuit of psychological well-being became a way of life as ideals of “personal growth” and an “abundant life” permeated the culture, influencing everything from religion to child rearing, education to marriage. This therapeutic ethos gave rise to novel mechanisms such as therapy sessions, encounter groups, personal counseling, and self-help books that proclaimed the promise of personal transformation. “Psychotherapy became directed, in a more general way, to the total enhancement of living,” historian Richard Weiss observed. “Indeed, psychology was changing from a discipline of study into a way of life. Health, always the aim of therapy, began to take on a vastly expanded meaning.”48
The new therapeutic mind-set appeared full-blown in How to Win Friends and Influence People. Carnegie presented human problems as primarily psychological ones and counseled readers to approach others without making moral judgments. “Instead of condemning people, let’s try to understand them. Let’s try to figure out why they do what they do,” he counseled. “As Dr. Johnson said, ‘God himself, sir, does not propose to judge man until the end of his days.’ Why should you and I?” Developing sensitivity to others involved an effort to implant certain attitudes in your psyche, Carnegie contended. “Keep it on the desk in front of you every day. Glance through it often,” he recommended of his book. “Keep constantly impressing yourself with the rich possibilities for improvement that still lie in the offing. Remember that the use of these principles can be made habitual and unconscious only by a constant and vigorous campaign of review and application. There is no other way.” He even urged a mental drill to aid in the process of internalizing psychological adroitness: “Say to yourself over and over: ‘My popularity, my happiness, and my income depend to no small extent upon my skill in dealing with people.’ ”49
Carnegie’s bright promises of personal transformation cemented the therapeutic worldview. Appearing as a folksy yet inspirational popular therapist, he claimed that his surefire methods for dealing with others would “literally revolutionize the lives of many people.” He proudly quoted from students and readers thrilled with the changes in their lives, both economically and emotionally. “I find that smiles are bringing me dollars, many dollars every day,” reported one. “And these things have literally revolutionized my life. I am a totally different man, a happier man, a richer man, richer in friendships and happiness—the only thing that matters much, after all.” Said another, “It all seems like magic.” For Carnegie, these personal transformations were the inevitable result of psychological adjustments in dealing with others. “I am talking about a new way of life,” he declared. “Let me repeat. I am talking about a new way of life.”50
Ultimately, as Philip Rieff has observed, such therapeutic formulations produced “psychological man” as the ideal type of modern individualism. “As cultures change, so do the modal types of personality that are their bearers,” he has written, and in the twentieth century the “psychologizers” have created the individual whose main commitment is to the self. Unlike “religious man,” for whom moral uprightness and salvation were the ultimate goals, or even “economic man,” who doggedly pursued his self-interest in the competitive race for profit, psychological man turned inward to cultivate psychological and physical well-being as the essence of happiness. Preaching “the gospel of self-fulfillment,” Rieff has noted, “psychological man has constituted his own careful economy of the inner life. The psychological man lives neither by the ideal of might nor by the ideal of right, which confused his ancestors … Psychological man lives by the ideal of insight—practical, experimental insight leading to the mastery of his own personality … [P]sychological man has espoused the ideal of salvation through self-contemplative manipulation.”51
Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, drawing from an array of psychological influences in the early twentieth century, became a founding text of modern therapeutic culture. This great popularizer disseminated psychologized values to every nook and cranny of middle-class America beginning in late 1936, and in so doing emerged as the father of the modern self-help movement. In his wake would come a long line of personal-growth disciples and self-improvement publications that would become ubiquitous within a few decades. Under his influence, “psychological man” (and shortly, “psychological woman”) became a cultural goal toward which countless citizens bent their efforts.
But despite the vast popularity and influence of How to Win Friends and Influence People as a how- to success tract, a guidebook for personality development and human relations, and a crucial event in the establishment of modern therapeutic culture, not everyone was enamored of it. Within weeks of its initial publication, the book triggered an outburst of criticism and debate. As with its popularity, the controversy surrounding the book would linger for decades.
“Every Act You Ever Performed Is Because You Wanted Something”
Within a few weeks of publication in early 1937, Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People shot to the top of the best-seller list for nonfiction. A great wave of acclaim and vast sales carried the book to a pinnacle of popularity, and testimonials to its life-changing impact began pouring in. “If I couldn’t replace this book I wouldn’t sell it at any price. The contents are priceless,” wrote one delighted reader. “Have never read anything that so stirred my ambition. Will read it many times,” testified another. Sales would continue nearly unabated, and over the next ten years the book would go through more than ninety reprintings and sell millions of copies.
But critical acclaim lagged far behind popular approval. Many newspapers, magazines, and journals of opinion ignored the book completely, and those that did pay notice usually offered lukewarm assessments. “You may snicker at the advice to make the other fellow feel important … You may scorn the ‘yes man’ implication, the syrupy drooling. But you can’t laugh off the fact that the folks we like best, those with whom we like best to spend our time, are those who endow us with the warm glow of being recognized for what we like to think we are,” admitted one reviewer rather grudgingly. Most assessments were much harsher. The Nation sneered that Carnegie “has given us the best outline of the science of tail-wagging and hand-licking ever written.” The New York Times substituted condescension for disdain, describing the best seller as a banal how- to book peddling hope to a pathetic audience of “wishful millions who have never been able to influence other people much, who would like to begin life all over again even though they are past 40, who long to be told how they can think for themselves, who live alone and hate it.” How to Win Friends and Influence People became an object of controversy as the intellectual establishment largely dismissed its principles and denounced its human relations strategies.1
