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There are many thousands of self-help books on the shelves of bookstores and libraries everywhere. When I searched on Amazon books for self-concept, I found 177 titles; identity turned up 6,593 titles, and self turned up 32,000! Unfortunately, nearly all of them are focused on problems, rather than solutions. Those books are full of descriptions of problemstheories, examples, stories, and case histories, but very little about how to solve them. The last book I read about self-concept had 184 pages describing problems of self-concept, but only 7 pages at the end discussed possible solutions, in vague and theoretical terms.
Psychiatrys Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders DSM IV-R has 873 pages of descriptions of how people can be mentally ill, but not a single page about how they could be helped! Imagine what it would be like if a medical doctor were in this positionshe has an 873 page manual describing how someone can be ill, but not a single word about how to treat illness! Sadly, that is the position of most psychology and psychotherapy todayand most psychiatry, with its bias toward drug solutions, is even worse.
When books do set forth worthwhile goals or solutions, they very rarely tell you what you can actually do to achieve them. If a medical text were like that, it might tell you that the solution to a certain illness is to remove the diseased tissue, but without telling how to do thatall the details of the surgical procedure, use of scalpels, clamps, sutures, antiseptics, anesthetics, etc., that you could use to accomplish that useful goal.
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