Celebrity Personas, Self-help Culture, and Collective Psychology: Reflections and transformations
Abstract
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).
References
Aurelius, M 2014, Meditations, London, Penguin.
Brinkmann, S 2017, Stand Firm: Resisting the Self-Improvement, Cambridge, Polity Press.
Brown, D 2012, Apocalypse, Objective Productions, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x09PDP6YX7A>
Brown, D 2016, Happy: Why more or less everything is absolutely fine, London, Penguin
Brown, D 2018a, Miracle, Netflix, Vaudeville Productions.
Brown, D 2018b, The Push, Netflix, Vaudeville Productions.
Brown, D 2018c, Sacrifice, Netflix Original.
Barlow, S 2017, ‘Understanding the Magician Archetype’, retrieved 07 July 2020, from <https://susannabarlow.com/on-archetypes/understanding-the-magician-archetype/>
Campbell, J 1949, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, California, New World Library
The Collective Psychology Project, 2018, A Larger Us, retrieved 11 November 2019, from <https://www.collectivepsychology.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/A-Larger-Us.pdf>
Ehrenreich, B 2010, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, London, Picador.
Epictetus 2008, Discourses and Selected Writings, London, Penguin.
Holiday, R, 2015, The Obstacle is the Way: The ancient art of turning adversity into opportunity. London, Profile Books.
Holiday, R 2016, Ego is the Enemy, London, Profile Books.
Holiday, R 2019, Stillness is the key: An Ancient Strategy for Modern Life, London, Profile Books.
Jung, CG 1959, The archetypes and the collective unconscious, New York, Routledge and Kegan.
Kelsey, D 2018, ‘Affective mythology and 'The Notorious' Conor McGregor: monomyth, mysticism, and mixed martial arts’, Martial Arts Studies, vol. 5, pp.15–35, DOI: http://doi.org/10.18573/mas.47
Kelsey, D (forthcoming) 2021, The Magic of Stories: Collective psychology and the work of Derren Brown.
Manson, M 2016, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life, New York, HarperCollins.
Pigliucci, M 2017, How To Be A Stoic: Ancient Wisdom for Modern Living. London, Penguin.
Seneca, L 2004, Letters from a Stoic, London, Penguin.
Copyright (c) 2020 Darren Kelsey

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.