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A slender volume of psychotherapeutic maxims titled How to Be Your Own Best Friend (HTBYOBF) by M. Newman and B. Berkowitz (with J. Owen, New York: Random House, 1971) recently gained top position on the bestseller list for many months. Its popularity casts light on the psychological issues confronting Americans and the psychological axioms the public has so far been offered to deal with them. While HTBYOBF lucidly urges the reader to more partiality toward himself, the book in an unanticipated and never explicated fashion advances the individual's struggle for concepts that can strengthen his mastery over the impact of forces from without. In other ways, HTBYOBF is distractive and even pernicious.
The authors, both psychoanalysts, encourage us in a healthily narcissistic act: to install a good friend within. But they steadily avert their gaze from who might be the indwelling mutilating enemy and how to compel him to debark or at least share his abode. The book focuses little on the possibility that we may give ourselves over to the demon within and devote ourselves to being another's worst enemy. The writers manifestly ignore the malevolence abounding on this planet and how their aphorisms may aid in coping with a world that may intend one's diminution or disappearance. In short, the book invites the reader to do what is good for himself without compelling him to be witness to evil. At the same time, the authors go further than other personality theorists in implicitly assuming an unconcern, a neglect, indeed a degree of disfavor from without and offering an avenue to adapt to it. I shall propose that it is this unique combination that makes special contribution to the book's popularity.
Sensible and practical derivatives of the psychoanalytic ethos, spiced by sweet exhortations, are blended together by Newman and Berkowitz. We are responsible for ourselves; we can help ourselves — if we are truly for ourselves; we are often our own worst enemy because we do things t