Response to Milden's Commentary: Healing the False Self in a Narcissistically Vulnerable Minister

In her response to my review of Lerner's (1985) The Dance of Anger: A Woman's Guide to Changing the Patterns of Intimate Relationships Dr. Milden assumes that I believe that there is no legitimate place for popular presentation of psychological knowledge and that feminist psychoanalytic writings do not represent a serious or thoughtful body of work. Quite the contrary. Although I did not expect The Dance of Anger to be a heavyweight, theoretical treatise, I did expect from someone of Lerner's stature at least a serious-popular book. What she has given us is “kitsch.” This remains paradoxical, for as Milden points out, Lerner has written serious and scholarly works on the subject.

Nor was I judging the book as I would a refereed article. There is a legitimate place for popular articles and books, both feminist and otherwise. And besides Chodorow, Gilligan, Fast, Miller, and Benjamin, the list could include, among others, Viorst, Lewis, and Kaplan. Some of these are scholarly too. Lerner's genre of “pop psychology” devalues our field. I am afraid I understand too well the marketing economy of publishing houses. The accusations of elitism and sexism are knee-jerk responses that curtail dialogue; they smack of Samuel Johnsons riposte about nationalism and patriotism.

There are serious conceptual issues here. Pop psychology reduces our expectations of language and substitutes attitudes and feelings for ideas. Publishing and self-help enterprises have been growth industries for more than a century—witness the proliferation of “recovery” books (one bookstore I visited stacked 91 titles in this area!). Still, encased in the kitsch and jargon are some sound, potentially helpful concepts into how personality develops. In our culture, women have been assigned the primary responsibility for the family's emotional stability, and these codependency, recovery, and “how to” books target these female nurturers. It is almost like a millenium fever—our desire to be reborn.

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