Whose fault is it? Exoneration and allocation of personal responsibility in relationship manuals

Self-help and governmentality

Sedgwick (1993) has pointed out that, since the 1970s, we have experienced an ‘epidemic’ of free will. Contemporary understandings and classification of the self are bound up with (neo)liberal political ideology and the rhetoric of choice, self-responsibility and individual aspiration (Heelas, 1991; Keat and Abercrombie, 1991; Rose, 1999a). Tied to this is the obligation of governing agencies to empower those citizens who do not embody or value these ideals – especially the poor, the marginal, minorities and women. The notion of empowerment has positive connotations, in political and social theory and practice, seeking to produce power within these groups, in line with liberal values (Cruikshank, 1993). This has been a popular notion in democratic societies among liberals, intellectuals, social workers and political activists since the 1960s, and is a popular concept among academics in the fields of cultural studies. Its aims are born of the two main threads within liberal-democratic discourses: a democratic emphasis on increased participation in society, and a liberal emphasis on autonomy, self-determination and self-help. Empowerment is, in this sense, ‘the normative correlate of the explanatory focus on agency’ (Dean, 1999: 67), meaning that human agents must be brought to recognise themselves as such, or be empowered to become what they rightfully are already.

Programmes of empowerment are examples of governmentality (Foucault, 1991) – or rationalities of government. This is what Rose (1999a, 1999b) calls a technology of citizenship, a strategy or technique for the transformation of subjectivity from powerlessness to active citizenship. This requires technical activities, including the provision of appropriate advice and motivational practices as a strategy of recruitment into a particular type of transformed subjectivity, involving the capacity to make (correct) choices and understand oneself as a particular type of motivated being. This involves the provision of a new identity – in which one recognises or discovers one’s inherent abilities, and the necessity of taking control of one’s own future, actively making choices, setting goals and devising strategies to reach them, in order to become happy, healthy and fulfilled. As part of these processes, we are counselled to scrutinise and monitor ourselves for our motivations, the implications and repercussions of our past, the consequences of our actions, the outcomes of our choices – it is these that constitute the ethical formations of our relations with others. Inevitably, the formation of a sufficiently ordered emotional life is a crucial part of this ethico-politics – the domain in which our personal lives and our public selves are fused.

Self-help books are among the foremost ways in which psy discourses of empowerment are disseminated, especially to women. ¹ In an important and insightful analysis of self-help books, Rimke (2000: 63) argues that, in such literature, individuals are rendered entirely responsible for their failures and successes, their despair and their happiness. Accusing self-help literature of ‘[a]ppropriating democratic liberalism’s and neo-liberalism’s ways of seeing the individual and the social world’, she says that empowerment techniques represent a mode of self-regulation which seeks to govern subjects in terms of their personal truths (2000: 63), and that ‘[t]his liberation/regulation paradox further operates by counseling subjects to sculpt a meaningful life without addressing or questioning the horizon of social relations and the contexts of social power’ (2000: 65).

My own studies of relationship manuals are broadly in agreement with Rimke, concurring that psy empowerment discourses tend towards a conception of the self in line with (neo)liberal political values, and that codependency literature, in particular, often pathologises love and concern for the other (Hazleden, 2004). For this study I examined a selection of best-selling self-help manuals focusing on relationships, rather than the more general self-help books that Rimke (2000) examined, which may be a factor in some of the differences in our findings. I chose relationship manuals because they enter into public discourse on some of the most private and intimate aspects of our lives, and because I am specifically interested in governmentality as it applies to women. However, I disagree that liberal discourse was ‘appropriated’ by self-help literature – rather, the two are mutually dependent, and arose together (Rose, 1994, 1999a). It would be fruitful to examine further the assertion that the ‘self-help phenomenon provides an example of the replacement of social grids of intelligibility by the hyper-responsibility of the individual’ (Rimke, 2000: 66) for two reasons: (1) social grids of intelligibility are present in all the books I examined, but are ambiguous and shifting; and (2) while in some respects the individual is indeed required to develop a hyper-responsibility, in other respects they are exonerated from culpability and self-determination. This, I will argue, is largely due to the influence of codependency literature on relationship manuals. Later, I will assess the assertion that citizenship and the public sphere are ‘negated’ (Rimke, 2000: 65) by self-help.

As Rimke says, ‘one is not explicitly coerced to engage in projects of self-help; one does so because one wants to improve’ (2000: 63). However, in the case of relationship manuals, it is reasonable to assume that the reader may have expectations that the book will provide her with assistance in her romantic relationship(s), rather than being concerned with working on herself. I have demonstrated elsewhere that such an expectation would be misguided (Hazleden, 2003, 2011). The first move that relationship manuals make is to diagnose the reader as having a wrong relationship with the self, which she must rectify by learning to know, nurture and love the self (Hazleden, 2003). Furthermore, the authors draw pictures of certain types of unruly, or disorderly, relationships and characterise family ties, and especially romantic ties, as being inherently harmful to the self, possibly symptomatic of a disease or biochemical addiction (Hazleden, 2004) – but most especially as codependency – and advocate detachment from others. However, this is not the same as denying or negating social relationships and social understanding: rather, the obligation to develop one’s self and detach from others is an inherently social (and indeed political) move. For example, the prescriptions for appropriate gender roles are linked to shifting social imperatives concerning women, the economy and the ‘health’ or otherwise of society (Hazleden, 2009).

I do not wish to paint a homogeneous picture of psy notions of selfhood, but certain themes emerge in all the books in this study which can be organised into a recognisable (if contradictory) account of the self in self-help books. Their central concern is the risk of the loss of self inherent in the experience of love, with the self being understood as almost synonymous with self-control. The notion of self-control carries concomitant notions of agency and self-responsibility: in order to ‘own’ one’s self (cf. Perls, 1972), one must first comprehend and acknowledge notions of self-determination and self-actualisation. This involves understanding responsibility for the initial formation of the self, life events, the life conditions in which one finds oneself and the extent to which it is possible (and desirable) to begin to take control of (and for) oneself.

Notions of responsibility in relationship manuals involve seemingly paradoxical and ambiguous ideas. I will argue that these contradictions are influenced by, and help legitimise, those held in codependency discourse. There was a huge boom in self-help books concerning this condition in the 1980s and 1990s, and the primary target was women (Peele, 1999; Peele and Brodsky, 1975; Rice, 1996); one publisher, who sold three million books on codependency in the United States in 1990, claimed women were 80 percent of the market (Miller and McHoul, 1998: 145). This ‘disease of the will’ (Valverde, 1998) is the pinnacle of the disordered and dysfunctional self (Rimke, 2000: 65).

Codependency

Because characteristics described within codependency literature match the traditional roles of caregiver and nurturer – roles that require self-sacrifice and compromise – a number of writers have challenged the codependency model from a feminist perspective (Appel, 1991; Babcock, 1995; Haaken, 1993; Hagan, 1989; Krestan and Bepko, 1990; Van Wormer, 1989). These writers have argued that existing social structures nurture the development of ‘caretaking’ and self-sacrifice among women and protect men from developing self-sacrificing tendencies. They suggest that the behaviours and attitudes that are labelled ‘codependency’ would be more accurately seen as a strong conformity with stereotypical feminine attributes. They further argue that explaining such behaviour as personal inadequacy is not only demeaning to women but distracts attention from the need for social change (Hands and Dear, 1994: 442).

In contrast, Giddens (1992) asserts that self-help books can be emancipatory, that the identification of conditions such as codependence can be liberating, and that therapeutic ideals may lead to a ‘reconciliation’ of the sexes. ² Irvine (1995) argues that, while contemporary discourses of the self advocate knowing the needs of the self and reaching a ‘balance’ between self and other, women are unable to achieve this due to economic dependence on men. ³ This means that emotional obligations are engendered, which make meeting these goals unlikely. Playing a ‘sick’ role, argues Irvine, allows small deviations from the female role – and thus codependence could be a reverse discourse, or a tool of resistance. However, to champion such a move would seem to suppose that, while traditional gender roles and economic inequalities are the product of unequal power relations, the values of groups such as CoDependents Anonymous (CoDA) have somehow been formulated outside social relations of power. Perhaps, rather than a ‘reverse discourse’, it is most useful to consider codependency – a disease which is usually self-diagnosed – as an example of the ‘democratisation of pastoralism’, or part of the array of ‘non-professionalised, low cultural-capital techniques for acting on oneself’ and the dissemination of novel maxims for problematising conduct and acting upon it (Valverde, 1998: 19–20).

The notion of codependency draws on both humanistic psychology and the disease model of addiction. It was born out of the 12-step programme as practised by Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), but there are some important differences in terms of techniques and politics between the two movements, with important implications for notions of the self. Rice (1996) points out that 12-step movements were born of what he calls the adaptational psychological movement. This is a movement that assumes that humans are by nature aggressive and potentially dangerous, and that culture, as the source of human morality and civilisation, is both valuable and necessary for social order – an approximately Hobbesian view of the self. Its purpose is to help the client adapt to the prevailing moral order – for example, by ‘curing’ a homosexual (Twitchell, 1950) or helping a woman adapt to her ‘appropriate’ gender role. However, there is none of Hobbes’s emphasis on the threat of violence to maintain social order. Instead, healthy human beings are presupposed to conform to social norms in a ‘natural’ way; indeed, non-conformity is seen in itself as being evidence of a disease (Rice, 1996: 341). This is perhaps best illustrated by an AA text that one of the symptoms of the disease was that: ‘It never occurred to us that we needed to change ourselves to meet conditions, whatever they were’ (Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, 1985: 47).

AA members are permitted and required to address the damage that their addiction does to themselves and others, rather than seek evidence of damage that may have caused the addiction. Statements that espouse an aetiology of addiction are labelled as ‘denial’, ‘stinkin thinkin’ and so on, to the extent that seeking the roots or causes of the disease is seen as a manifestation of symptoms of the disease (Rice, 1996: 342). In contrast, groups such as CoDA concentrate on just such an aetiology. The likely factors thought to lead to codependence include having been in close relationships with alcoholics, having grown up in a dysfunctional family and, more generally, the influence of school and church, or even the process of socialisation itself – especially socialisation involving values of caring and community. Codependency rhetoric therefore presents itself as resisting dominant discourses and institutions (Denzin, 1997) – church, school and especially family. CoDA sees these as institutions that encourage codependency by not setting appropriate personal boundaries. Societal institutions, then, are characterised as phenomena that reduce a naturally right, whole, authentic self to one that is wrong, damaged and inauthentic. Here, one can clearly ascertain the influence of early humanistic psychology, which assumed that culture and norms are not always necessary or valuable, and are often unduly repressive.

Exoneration and allocation of responsibility ⁴

It is in the authors’ discussions of the formation of the self that we first see the ambiguity in their notions of responsibility. One author says ‘the judgments and evaluations made by parents and siblings early in life have become a potent part of you’ (Friedman, 1985: 70), demonstrating an aetiology of the relationship of the self with itself (Hazleden, 2003). However, on the next page she says ‘Paula has caught on to a truth: The measure of her self-esteem is determined by self-knowledge, not the opinions of others’ (Friedman, 1985: 71). That these two apparently opposite world-views can be held simultaneously bears some investigation.

The self is understood as having been formed in childhood: ‘Our self-esteem is formed largely by the way our parents react to us’ (Vedral, 1993: 77). In cases of traumatic childhood experiences, ‘[t]he scars of this early damage to one’s sense of lovability and personal value may lead to a desperation … in adult life’ (Cowan and Kinder, 1986: 56). This damage can be caused by problems such as insufficient parental attention, parental divorce (Carter-Scott, 2000: 91), the arrival of a new sibling or one’s parents not providing one with the right kind of shoes (Doyle, 2000: 21). The result is that, ‘like all children, you grew up knowing the anguish of unmet needs’ (Hendrix, 1997: 28, emphasis added) – because childhood itself is pathological, and it is therefore certain that ‘some wounding took place in the first few months of our lives’ (Hendrix, 1997: 24). Indeed, the very process of becoming a social being is a violent one: Hendrix (1997: 29) discusses ‘an even subtler kind of childhood wound, an even subtler kind of psychic injury called “socialization,” all those messages we receive from our caretakers and from society at large that tell us who we are and how we have to behave’. This is a process in which, as another author says, ‘we repeatedly left our centres, that place of innocence and simplicity, unaware that it could lead to self-destruction and even death of that self’ (Spezzano, 1994: 87), because, through socialisation ‘[i]n essence we were told that we could not be whole and exist in this culture’ (Hendrix, 1997: 31–2). It is therefore necessary to attempt to think back to very early childhood, to recover what McGraw (2001: 2) describes as ‘a time when … your life was full of hope and optimism.… You were centered on this God-given core that uniquely defined you.’

The process of allocating and abdicating responsibility thus begins with an examination of childhood, through which it is assumed we are constituted. This formation is inevitably and inherently pathological – the self is seen as a good, whole self when born, but corrupted by society, socialisation and (especially) parenting. This notion of the ‘good’ essential self having become the ‘bad’ socially produced self is one that is largely in line with the tenets of Rogerian therapy.

Furthermore, many relationship manuals posit the treacherous biological body as conspiring against the ‘good’ self. All the authors in this study include prolonged narratives about mismanaged, unruly or disordered relationships: near the beginning of the books, they appear to exonerate the reader of blame for the problems she is (presumably) experiencing with her partner. Forward (1986: 4), for example, gives an example of the wrong thinking that one of her clients held: ‘Susan kept telling herself that he was a wonderful man, that he was exciting to be with, and that, therefore, if something went wrong, it must be her fault.’ This is a common mistake, we are told, and is a ‘dynamic [that] is behind much of the self-blame in women who love too much’ (Norwood, 1986: 14). The real problem is that:

Many women … because of their emotional histories of living with constant and/or severe episodes of stress in childhood (and also because often they may have inherited a biochemical vulnerability to depression from an alcoholic or otherwise biochemically inefficient parent), are basically depressives before they even begin their love relationships as teens and adults. Such women may unconsciously seek the powerful stimulation of a difficult and dramatic relationship in order to stir their glands to release adrenaline. (Norwood, 1986: 182–3)

We may therefore be compelled by our own biochemically driven bodies to seek traumatic experiences, and here we can discern a certain ambiguity concerning the notion of responsibility. Romantic love is portrayed as ‘intoxicating’ (Carter-Scott, 2000: 231), ‘addictive’ (Carter-Scott, 2000: 211; Cowan and Kinder, 1986: 170–5; McGraw, 2001: 43; Norwood, 1986: 1–2), and akin to alcoholism (Beattie, 1992; Forward, 1986; Norwood, 1986), necessitating help from a psy expert practitioner (Norwood, 1986: 59). Excessive concern for the other (especially, but not exclusively, a romantic partner) is rendered a symptom of a psychological illness or addiction referred to as ‘loving too much’ (Norwood, 1986), ‘fusion’ (Dowling, 1981: 144–5; Forward, 1986: 24–5), or, most commonly, codependency (Beattie, 1992). Again, psy expertise can help with this problem: one client, prior to therapy had ‘called his behavior kindness, concern, love.… Now, after getting help for his problem, he calls it codependency’ (Beattie, 1992: 26). I have discussed this pathologisation of love elsewhere (Hazleden, 2004), but here it is sufficient to note that, for the authors, women often erroneously take responsibility or blame themselves for the failure of a relationship, but are in the grip of an addiction, which may have its roots in childhood. Like drug addicts, they are simultaneously held to be non-accountable for their actions while in the grip of an illness, but entirely responsible for seeking help and conquering the disease itself. This cure will inevitably be based in psy expertise, centred on correcting the relationship that the reader has with herself (see Hazleden, 2003).

Here, the authors are treading a fine line between absolving the reader of all responsibility for their unhappiness – by attributing it to childhood experience, potentially damaging biology and the nature of love itself – and allocating absolute responsibility to the reader by stating that she is choosing to be a participant in a traumatic relationship because of her addiction. This simultaneous apportioning and absolving of blame is particularly apparent in Forward’s discussion of abused women:

[T]hey all carried with them from childhood a profoundly negative view of themselves. It was this damaged self image, more than any other factor, that set these women up to accept abusive treatment from their partners. (1986: 128, emphasis added)

Even if a woman thinks that she did not choose to be with a violent or otherwise destructive man: ‘Actually she did choose, albeit unconsciously’ (Norwood, 1986: 78, emphasis added). Therefore, as well as accepting full responsibility for her own behaviour, she must accept responsibility for the behaviour that others extend towards her, because: ‘You have chosen to live in a way in which no other result could occur’ (McGraw, 2001: 9). To deny this is:

[S]imilar to the denial used by the prisoner, slave, or member of a minority group who comes to accept the derogatory view of his own status in order to achieve maximum security and advantage. In other words, there are advantages to remaining in a state of thraldom – advantages so great that many women prefer to remain slaves rather than forfeit the security slavery provides. (Dowling, 1981: 155)

Because of this, it is vital to ‘become aware of what you think of yourself by how you act, and by how the world acts towards you’ (Spezzano, 1994: 15, emphasis added). Ultimately, the aim of the authors is to enable the reader to say ‘I am responsible for what I do to others and what … others do to me’ (Beattie, 1992: 114–15, emphasis added). Carter-Scott says ‘it means accepting responsibility for what happens to you’ (2000: 11), including accepting responsibility for domestic violence perpetrated against oneself (Forward, 1986: 94–5; Norwood, 1986: 15).

Accidents that threaten the life of the reader are also to be regarded as manifestations of unconscious desires (Vedral, 1993: 132) – one author claims to have saved himself from everything from flu to death, simply by ‘taking responsibility’ (Spezzano, 1994: 21), and claims that ‘Everything, including the negative stuff, happens because we choose it’ (1994: 76, emphasis added). He goes so far as to say that children choose to be sexually abused to ‘satisfy their curiosity without responsibility.… Suffering is a veiled form of attack’ (1994: 128).

Because of these suppositions, the authors assert that the reader’s life can be dramatically improved simply by changing her thoughts. Norwood (1986: 146) avers that ‘What we manifest in our lives is a reflection of what is deep inside us’, and another author asserts that ‘If you change your mind, you can literally change the world’ (Spezzano, 1994: 121). Another concurs: ‘When you tap into your own core of consciousness, and you start creating your own experience, you will notice that the world … will start to relate to you differently’ (McGraw, 2001: 3).

Therapeutic moments in the books therefore usually take the form of an insight about the self, which in and of itself brings about the beginnings of a therapeutic transformation: ‘Fortunately, the pattern … can be broken as soon as you become aware of it’ (Carter-Scott, 2000: 11–12, emphasis added), as clients and readers ‘recognise that the choice to behave as they do is now theirs’ (Forward, 1986: 178) and ‘can now choose to escape’ (McGraw, 2001: 244, emphasis added). This is because, while a childhood may have had an adverse effect on the self, ‘as an adult, that grown child has responsibility for what he or she does about the aftermath of those tragic events of childhood’ (McGraw, 2001: 244). This means that a bad habit, such as poor self-esteem ‘is not our fault … but it is our responsibility to learn to stop doing it’ (Beattie, 1992: 123).

Thus we find that the authors may hold the reader responsible for what has thus far happened in her life, in the sense that it is her thinking that has manifested her situation and her ‘life events’. However, because it is only psy expertise that can intervene and allow her the realisation of this truth, the reader is absolved of any blame, guilt or sense of failure for that which has gone before. Nonetheless, it is made clear that from now on, following her introduction to this therapeutic truth, the reader is to take responsibility for breaking any destructive patterns of behaviour, thought or expectation. The self is rendered, henceforth, as responsible for its situation, to recognise that everything is a matter of choice.

Exoneration from, and allocation of, culpability can also be found in the books’ concerns with spirituality. Like CoDA, all the books in this study insisted on the absolute necessity of a faith in a ‘higher power’. As part of this emphasis on spiritual beliefs, the authors enjoin the readers to have faith in a god that pays attention to the individual, and who will help, when asked, over small matters or large. Vedral (1993: 303) instructs her reader to ‘Ask Him to have His will in your life – and to deliver you from this negative relationship’ and ‘then relax and see what happens. Miraculously, something will happen that will facilitate the ending of your negative relationship.’ Doyle (2000: 236) says that, instead of worrying about unpaid bills, ‘remind yourself that the Creator is in charge, and that everything will happen in perfect divine timing’. In order to achieve this, the reader should ‘Tell God these are the things we’re interested in, ask for His help, then surrender humbly’ (Beattie, 1992: 172). This is because ‘[b]eginning to turn over what you cannot manage to a power greater than yourself can bring enormous relief’ (Norwood, 1986: 209). Indeed, this is the very meaning of faith: ‘developing your spirituality, no matter what your religious orientation, basically means letting go of self-will, of the determination to make things happen the way you think they should’ (Norwood, 1986: 210).

Here, then, the authors seem to be absolving the reader of (aspects of) responsibility for self-determination. However, while they are trying to persuade the reader to let go of ‘self-will’, they are not advocating a denial of self – rather, they are advocating a detachment from the world around them, and a retreat into, or renewed concentration on, the self. As part of the process of surrendering to god, and in order to ‘find the freedom to live our own lives without excessive feelings of guilt about, or responsibility towards others’, we must practise detachment, which ‘requires faith – in ourselves, in God, in other people, and in the natural order and destiny of things in this world’ (Beattie, 1992: 63). It is vitally important, therefore, not to confuse surrender to god with a denial of the self.

Beattie assures the reader that god wants people to live their lives ‘from a position of high self-esteem’ and insists that god ‘never intended people to use the Scriptures to behave in unhealthy ways’ (1992: 93). We are not, then, to ‘forfeit our personal, God-given power to think, feel and behave in our best interests’ (1992: 68). McGraw (2001: 59) and Spezzano (1994) insist that one’s ‘inner voice’ about what one wants is quite literally the voice of god; McGraw even insists that ‘free will’ is the will of god. Therefore adherence to oneself and one’s needs is adherence to the will of the divine, not a selfish ethic, but a spiritual obligation. Here we can see that the authors tread a very fine line between imputing culpability and decreeing exoneration: one is to surrender one’s will to god, while obeying the divine instruction to act in our own self-interest.

Thus, several competing conceptions of the self are held in relationship manuals, and carry with them ambiguous and contradictory notions of personal responsibility. The authors postulate an ontology of the human as being a creature of the unconscious, and assert that childhood is inherently pathological and damaging to the unconscious – this is neither the fault nor the responsibility of the self. They then identify self-blame for a failing relationship as erroneous thinking, and point to the dangerous and addictive nature of love, exonerating the reader from culpability for her problems, but placing the onus on her to conquer her addiction. They propose that, due to psychological injuries, we unconsciously desire that which will do us further harm, and that it is the individual human mind that determines that individual’s social reality. The authors allocate responsibility for the ‘outer’ (social) world to the ‘inner’ (psychological) world – they find the unconscious mind culpable for the reader’s social situation. However, because we unconsciously manifest social realities, they propose that, with the help of psy expertise, this unconscious process can be consciously interrupted – the mere recognition of one’s control over one’s life is sufficient. Only psy insight, however, can provide the enlightenment necessary for the reader to perform this vital function: she is to free herself by submitting to psy authority. The authors thereby exonerate the reader of any (past) responsibility for her (present) situation, while at the same time they assert that, following the introduction of the reader to the psy ethos, she is henceforth made culpable for her future situation: this places the onus of responsibility squarely onto the reader. They assert that the individual can manifest for herself a better social reality – but only by letting go of a will to do so, surrendering self-will and responsibility to a higher power.

Adaptation to (neo)liberal culture

Notions of responsibility in the relationship manuals in this study are complex, ambiguous and contradictory, and there are tensions within and between them. Responsibility has various connotations – blame, culpability, accountability, causality, obligation, self-governance – and these are not usually explicated within the books. However, as we have seen, the authors tend to share the same ambiguous notions of responsibility as those held by CoDA, in that there is an essential self that has been perverted or damaged by external forces, including institutions such as (traditional) religious beliefs and the family, as well as by cultural values and the process of socialisation, leading to addiction, disorderly lives and relationships. These distortions of the self must be identified and resisted in order for the true, orderly, coherent self to emerge. The healthy human subject investigates the various social reasons for the situation in which it finds itself, but understands that it is nonetheless (ambiguously) responsible, not only for its own actions, but the actions of others towards it. Detachment from external referents and relations is therefore required – from traditional feminine values of care and compassion, from religious doctrines of giving to the other, and from family: ‘Your family thinks of you as a pet, you have to leave them. They are just where you came from, they are not what you are’ (Friedman, 1985: 216). This detachment is the sole responsibility of the individual, but again, paradoxically, can only be achieved through exposure to psy expertise.

The shift from AA’s prohibition of investigating aetiology, to the position of CoDA and these relationship manuals, that insists on locating the causes of the disease within societal institutions and values, creates a paradox at the heart of their thinking, because they insist that their addiction is nonetheless a violation of social mores and values, which can pull the victim away from reality, truth and normal social behaviours. Their argument thus seems to be that social values and institutions cause the problems and addictions, at the same time as saying that the disease features violations of normal social values and institutions. This has led one commentator to argue that if people ‘abide by societal rules they are sick; if they violate those rules they are also sick’ (Rice, 1996: 355).

However, the tensions in this view are perhaps not as irreconcilable as Rice suggests. The poisonous values that CoDA attributes to social institutions such as church, family and educational establishments are values which can be seen as either approximately leftist or approximately conservative. They may be considered leftist because of the emphasis on thinking of, and caring for, others, together with ideals of self-sacrifice and what one of the authors in this study calls ‘destructive giving’ (Beattie, 1992: 94) and another calls ‘being good’ (Norwood, 1986: 130). They can also, though, be considered conservative because of their traditional association with femininity (and it is usually women who are diagnosed – or, more likely, diagnose themselves – as being codependent), respect for tradition, suspicion of change and unwillingness to embrace novel social roles and opportunities. For CoDA, this disease takes away the healthy and normal state of human existence in which people form their own ethical frameworks, independently of cultural or social influence.

The correct ethics to have, according to CoDA and the authors of the self-help books, are values which are roughly congruent with (neo)liberal values. Leftist-style emphasis on community and mutuality is undesirable because it leads to a situation in which one is bound up with others, entailing the possibility of dependence, helplessness and a dangerous loss of self. Even for those authors who advocate conservative gender roles, these are prescribed as a way of surrendering injurious practices of the self, such as attempting to manipulate or control others, and because traditional gender roles are seen as the easiest way to attain a self-regarding, self-loving, self-involved and actualised self. It is not therefore the case, as Rice contends, that if codependants abide by societal rules they are sick, and if they violate those rules they are also sick – rather, it is a case of choosing the correct social rules by which to live – which are the (neo)liberal rules of personal responsibility, detachment, mobility, and personal and social transformation. Perhaps, then, there is not so dramatic a difference between CoDA and the adaptational models as Rice contends. While an adaptational movement might seek, for example, to ‘cure’ a homosexual, codependency theorists and self-help authors identify family and social institutions as repressive, leading into a project of alternative identity construction. But this project, in producing new identities and new ethical self-understandings, simultaneously enmeshes them in the rules of confession, and particular prescribed ethical behaviours (such as detachment) in order to effect a cure for the condition of not being a liberal, self-governing, autonomous and orderly self. This is where Giddens (1992) and Irvine (1995) are mistaken. Their arguments are founded on the assumption that these discourses are formulated outside of power relations – but they are the epitome of governmental ideas about correct citizenship and calculable individuals (see Hazleden, 2011).

Rimke (2000: 65) argues that self-help books exhort their readers to reshape their lives ‘without addressing or questioning the horizon of social relations and the contexts of social power’, but I have found that they explicitly address social relations, and the social values of caring, self-sacrifice and tradition (along with other ostensibly feminine attributes), rejecting them as unhelpful or harmful. Unruly and disorderly relationships are depicted as both offending the prevailing moral order and resulting from it. Thus, the ‘social grids of intelligibility’ that Rimke finds lacking in the books are the linchpin of the authors’ ontologies. Furthermore, while in some respects the reader is indeed required to develop a hyper-responsibility, as Rimke claims, in other respects she is partially exonerated from culpability, because of the pathological nature of the society in which she was reared, and from self-determination, because god’s will must be followed, rather than one’s own. It is not correct, then, to state as Rimke (2000: 63) does, that self-help renders individuals entirely responsible for their own happiness or unhappiness.

Public/private selves

I would also suggest that Rimke perpetuates an illusory divide between the private and the public (cf Rose, 1987), when she states that self-help discourses negate the public sphere and public responsibility. Individual citizenship is no longer primarily realised in relation to the state, nor in the ‘public’ sphere, but in quasi-public activities such as work and shopping, and in ‘private’ practices of the family and personal relationships (Rose, 1999a: xxiii). Such ethico-political discourses are private and intimate while simultaneously visible and public. The obligation to transmogrify oneself into an autonomous, self-actualising individual is a social responsibility – the very definition of a political self. Thus, while the books may speak to a conception of the self as individualised and atomised, they nonetheless contain a social context. By prescribing what is ‘right’ or ‘healthy’ for the individual they also provide a picture of what a healthy society should look like, and how healthy relationships between individuals should be conducted. Political selves are, therefore, produced by (inter alia) self-help. Contemporary liberal-democratic forms of power are, therefore, contingent upon the orderly, classifiable, calculable, self-determined kinds of individuals as advocated and endorsed as teleological models in self-help literature. Rimke’s suggestion that the public sphere is ‘negated’ by self-help implies that the practice of reading self-help is a private one, devoid of political connotations and rhetoric; but this ignores the ways in which we ‘enfold’ (Dean, 1991: 223–4; Deleuze, 1992; Rose, 1998: 188–93) political forms of authority into our subjectivities. Liberal governance presupposes the possibility, and desirability, of an individual who fuses ethical and political domains (Dean, 1995: 562).

Because governing in a liberal-democratic way means governing through the freedom and aspirations of subjects (Rose, 1992: 147), liberal democracy has long been bound up with ways of producing the type of citizens with ‘private’, individual aptitudes, capacities and objectives that are required to bear the ‘public’ political responsibility with which they are endowed. Choices we must make include prioritising one’s career, one’s family or one’s partner; maintaining one’s own lifestyle or providing care for an elderly relative; planning for financial security or living for the moment; security or risk. Relationship manuals urge us to develop and nurture aspirations for achievements in personal terms, cast out tradition, be willing to embrace change, tackle new social roles, and seize new opportunities. Citizenship does not therefore ‘disappear’ in this view, as Rimke (2000: 65) claims; rather its ethical and moral obligations are reshaped and reinterpreted. Self-help literature permits and requires a notion of social obligation in that technologies of the self (Foucault, 1988) such as responsibility, self-discipline and self-knowledge are the ‘right,’ or ethical, thing to do, not only for the sake of the self, but for one’s partner, the wider society and god. This has the effect of transforming the notion of social responsibility or citizenship – excising mutuality and commonality – but does not negate it.

A liberal-democratic state straddles two opposing imperatives – the desire, on the one hand, to limit itself and its legitimate areas of concern, to allow private lives to be private, and, on the other hand, to bring about social order and economic progress, requiring participation in social life and political processes. While such states limit their activities of prohibition, and their formal, legalistic prominence, there is a simultaneous proliferation of authority among agencies and experts that are designed to encourage social values such as wealth, autonomy, efficiency and self-fulfilment. In a parallel with relationship manuals and programmes of recovery from codependency, this technology of citizenship requires awareness of one’s powerlessness, knowledge of its causes and action to change the conditions. These ideas have resonated with feminism and civil rights movements, and now form part of the rhetoric of liberal-democratic states: they have become synonymous with our values, ideals and aspirations, or ‘with the selves each of us want to be’ (Rose, 1999a: 213).

Conclusion

In this article, I have shown that psy ontologies concerning notions of responsibility are ambiguous, shifting and paradoxical. My purpose has been to make the familiar unfamiliar, and defatalise the present (see Foucault, 1977), by pointing to the inconsistency and arbitrariness of the truths about human subjectivity found within relationship manuals. To argue, as Rimke does, that self-help books posit and promote an ethic of personal responsibility, as part of a strategy of governmentality, is useful and insightful. However, to suggest that such discourses advocate a singular conception of hyper-responsibility is to miss the often unrelated, quirky and precarious notions of responsibility in these texts. This should not be a surprise if we accept that they arose alongside the contradictory and ambiguous demands of the liberal-democratic ideal, and accurately reflect and reproduce its tensions.