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Abstract
This chapter focuses on the self-help genre, or what it calls the daily affirmation. French pharmacist turned psychotherapist Émile Coué (1857–1926) is known for his gospel of better living through self-hypnosis (expounded in his 1922 book Self Mastery through Conscious Autosuggestion). In America, his upbeat mantra “Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better” harmonized nicely with the bull-market optimism of a nation whistling “We’re in the Money.” It was and is the perfect novena for the secular religion of success that is America’s one true faith. But the country’s founding father of the self-improvement craze is Benjamin Franklin, whose schematic approach to self-betterment, laid out in his Autobiography, endures in the pseudoscientific charts and numbered checklists that are fixtures of the literature on personal growth. The growing popularity of audiobooks has transformed self-help into a billion-dollar industry, bestridden by motivational gurus such as Zig Ziglar and Anthony Robbins. The assumption that you are what you think is a cornerstone of self-improvement theology, from Coué to Stephen Covey.
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