Vying Constructions of Reality: Religion, Science, and "Positive Thinking" in Self-Help Literature

Abstract

This article tracks how self-help literature, from the 19th century through the 20th, has rallied the support of religious, scientific, and spiritual constructions of reality to strengthen the validity of the genre's central concept of positive thinking. Positive thinking claims that people can become healthy and happy by thinking positive thoughts, thereby implying that individuals in isolation can accomplish the restorative healing regularly attributed to social interaction. The genre's history provides an index of the struggle between religious and scientific sense making in mediated popular culture. I argue that from 1880 to 1910, self-help books relied on alternative religious notions to argue that individuals should practice positive thinking. From the 1940s through the 1960s, as psychology entered popular culture, some self-help encouraged readers to explore "negative" root causes of ill health and unhappiness. By the 1980s and '90s, positive thinking had incorporated popular psychology into a hybrid "spirituality," a concept that encouraged readers to place negative thoughts in the past and envision only a positive future. The trajectory chronicled here allowed the genre to accomplish two ends: to remain culturally viable by reflecting popular depictions of self and society and to retain the core idea of positive thinking relatively unchanged.