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Tobey Gross, Un-Help: Why Your Pain Is Profitable. An Epistemic Critique of the Self-Help Industry (Minkowski Institute Press, Montreal), 78 pages
ISBN: 978-1-998902-69-9 (ebook) - $7.00
ISBN: 978-1-998902-68-2 (softcover) - $16.00
Buy the ebook (PDF with hyperlinks)
Published on 11 August 2025
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Description:
This monograph offers an epistemic and psychological critique of the self-help and mindset industry, arguing that it operates not as a space of healing but as a cultural and economic engine that commodifies suffering. The industry thrives by sustaining the very inadequacy it claims to resolve, because it depends on the idea that one is never enough. Platforms, algorithms and influencer culture are fertile ground for marketing an industry that pretends to heal but deepens existential alienation. The modern subject is not understood but transformed into a perpetual project for optimization. This work calls for the reclamation of depth, relation, and existential honesty: a psychology that refuses to become a subscription model.
"Tobey Gross identifies a crucial problem with the self-help industry: the economically motivated tendency to create the problems it solves. "Agency" becomes the goal, and the object of the industry's help, whose promise is never fulfilled, in place of the satisfactions and dilemmas of ordinary life."
- Stephen P. Turner, Distinguished University Professor, University of South Florida, Department of Philosophy
"This monograph beautifully dissects the self-help industry with a lucidity that is both disarming and necessary. More than a critique, it is an epistemological intervention. The author reveals how suffering, once the intimate terrain of clinical listening and symbolic elaboration, is now converted into algorithmic spectacle-flattened, branded, and endlessly recycled. The work's most striking insight lies in its description of how self-help produces the very insufficiency it promises to resolve, transforming vulnerability into a site of capital accumulation. In this sense, the book aligns with traditions of critical theory, adding a personal sensibility and ethical stance. Tobey Gross, in an evocative and sophisticated way, reveals us an ontological betrayal: nowadays the subject is not heard, but managed; not transformed, but disciplined, even through the illusion to help him. Against the tyranny of optimization and the seductive hypocrisy of the self-help industry, the text reclaims the sacred slowness of subjectivity, reminding us that healing is not a transaction but a relation. It is a timely, incisive, and deeply ethical contribution to the conversation on how we care-or fail to care-for psychic life in a neoliberal age"
- Fanny Guglielmucci, Professor of Psychodynamic Psychology, Rome III University
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