Education, Parenting, and Mental Health Care in Europe

Front matter

EDUCATION, PARENTING, AND MENTAL HEALTH CARE IN EUROPE

THE CONTRADICTIONS OF BUILDING AUTONOMOUS INDIVIDUALS

Education, Parenting, and Mental Health Care in Europe

Contents

List of Contributors Acknowledgments

Introduction: Puzzling Autonomy NICOLAS MARQUIS AND EMMANUELLE LENEL

PART I Autonomy in the Brain?: (Neuro)Cognitive Sciences and Changing Representations of the Child and the Pupil

PART II Autonomy Under (Self-)Control?: Social and Emotional (In) Competencies

4 Theorizing Strengthened Demands for Social Skills, Emotional Control, and Autonomy SUNE QVOTRUP JENSEN AND ANNICK PRIEUR xii viii Contents

5 Balanced Emotional Expressions: Learning to Be an Autonomous Social Being 95 EVA GULLOV

6 Parental Coaching and the “Happy Medium” Between Laxism and Authoritarianism: Experts in Common Sense 110 NICOLAS MARQUIS AND SOLENE MIGNON

PART III Shaping Autonomy Makers?: Paradoxes in Institutional Guidance for Parents and Teachers 127

7 From Educating Mothers to Neuroparenting: Ideas and Controversies in Parenting Issues 129 CLAUDE MARTIN

8 Pregnancy After “a Choice to Drink”: Meanings of Autonomy in England’s Policies on Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder 145 ELLIE LEE

9 Doing Good Parenthood in Early Childhood Education and Care 161 ALLAN WESTERLING

10 How Education Demands Autonomy on the Part of Pupils: A Sociological Approach to a Paradox 175 HÉLOÏSE DURLER

PART IV Diagnosing the Effects of Autonomy?: Transformations

of Mental Health Suffering in Liberal-Individualistic

Societies 189

11 Antidepressant Medication as Identity Construction: And So What? 191 ANDERS PETERSEN

12 Empowerment at the Heart of Psychedelic Care: To Be or Not to Be, That Is Not the Question 205 FANNY CHARRASSE AND NICOLAS MARQUIS

Contents ix

Mental Health, Higher Education, and Regulatory Capitalism: Steering, Not Rowing 220 ASHLEY FRAWLEY, CHLOE WAKEHAM, AND KEN MCLAUGHLIN

Voice-Hearers and Highly Sensitive People Reversing the

Stigma of Madness: Dissolving, Stating, or Valuing the

Difference? 237 NICOLAS MARQUIS, ALEX MAIGNAN, AND CHLOE DAELMAN

Afterword: Beyond Autonomy 253 NICOLAS MARQUIS

Contributors

Fanny Charrasse is a post-doctoral researcher at UCLouvain Saint-Louis Brussels University (Belgium) and part of the ERC CoachingRituals project.

Chloé Daelman is a research and administrative assistant at UCLouvain Saint- Louis Brussels University (Belgium) and part of the ERC CoachingRituals project.

Véronique Degraef is a senior researcher at UCLouvain Saint-Louis Brussels University (Belgium) and part of the ERC CoachingRituals project.

Héloise Durler is an associate professor of sociology at HEP-Lausanne (Switzerland).

Alain Ehrenberg is a senior research director at CNRS (France).

Ashley Frawley is an associate professor of sociology at Swansea University (United Kingdom).

Eva Gullov is a professor in educational anthropology at Aarhus University

(Denmark).

Sune Qvotrup Jensen is an associate professor of sociology at Aalborg University (Denmark).

Ellie Lee is a professor of family and parenting research at the University of Kent (United Kingdom) and director of the Centre for Parenting Culture Studies.

Emmanuelle Lenel is a professor of sociology at UCLouvain Saint-Louis Brussels University (Belgium) and part of the ERC CoachingRituals project.

Alex Maignan is a PhD student at Université Paris Nanterre (France) and part of the ERC CoachingRituals project.

Nicolas Marquis is a professor of sociology at UCLouvain Saint-Louis Brussels University and principal investigator of the ERC CoachingRituals project.

Contributors xi

Claude Martin is a senior research director at CNRS (France).

Ken McLaughlin is an associate lecturer at Swansea University (United Kingdom).

Soléne Mignon is a PhD student at UCLouvain Saint-Louis Brussels University (Belgium) and part of the ERC CoachingRituals project.

Stanislas Morel is an associate professor of sociology at Université Sorbonne- Paris-Nord (France).

Anders Petersen was an associate professor of sociology at Aalborg University (Denmark).

Annick Prieur is a professor of sociology at Aalborg University (Denmark). Chloe Wakeham is a PhD student at Swansea University (United Kingdom).

Allan Westerling is an associate professor at Roskilde University (Denmark).

Acknowledgments

This book is the result of a collective, albeit autonomous, process. As the editor, let me express my deepest thanks to the members of the project CoachingRituals, especially Emmanuelle Lenel and Chloé Daelman, for their contributions and support in the editing process. I am also grateful to the authors who accepted to embark on this journey for their sensitivity in handling the complex issue of autonomy. Let me also thank the Routledge team for their work. Finally, this book exists thanks to the support of the European Research Council, which funded the CoachingRituals project (n°850754). Other bodies participated in the funding of translation and the Open Access: ANGER-project at Aalborg University, Haute école pédagogique du canton de Vaud, UCLouvain Saint-Louis Bruxelles University, Rennes University, and Sorbonne Paris Nord University. I would like to thank them all.

Puzzling Autonomy

A journey in autonomy

Imagine: You wake up after having slept for a long but unknown time and have to figure out what exactly has changed, and to what extent, in the society you wake up in. Turning on the radio in the morning, you hear a commercial about a professional training course on how to “be a leader” in both your private and your professional life. Even though you are not yet wide awake, this arouses your interest and, whilst drinking your coffee, you visit the website. On the front page you come across a proposal in bold type: coaches are available to help you “take back control of your life” and to be “freed from constraining social norms” that prevent you from unleashing your “true potential” and finally achieving “autonomy”. How do they claim to do this? It seems that what they offer consists mainly of “empowerment” sessions through which those seeking leadership are encouraged to find the answers and guidance “within themselves”. This reclaiming path, they say, starts with “being yourself”.

Being yourself? At last! This is what you have always wanted, and you are pretty sure that you do not need to be empowered to do it! Still, let’s give it a try: you leave the apartment and, once in the street, you begin to engage in conversations with strangers because your inner self has always been very sociable. Unfortunately, these passers-by look at you suspiciously. A person even asks what is wrong with you “from a mental health point of view” and says you should get treatment. Luckily, a good Samaritan bystander asks you how he can help. You tell him that you just woke up and felt entitled to be yourself. He says that he understands but then gently explains to you that being an autonomous person is not simply doing what you want and expressing yourself freely: it means doing it in a certain way that will put people at ease and help you be recognized for who you are. He encourages you to develop your “social skills” in order to understand informal norms and reminds you that being yourself also comes with a sense of “personal responsibility”.

“Being yourself” seems much more complicated than you first thought. You take a rest on a nearby bench, closing your eyes for a little while and processing what has just happened. Someone apologizes for disturbing you “during your mindfulness meditation” and ask if you are alright. You have no

DOI: 10.4324/9781003377207-1 This chapter has been made available under a CC-BY 4.0 license.

idea what to answer. Given your astonishment, the young lady adds that she wants to know “if you feel that you are in the driver’s seat of your life”. Your head begins to ache and you hold it in your hands. Taking that gesture as a “no”, the woman then says that even if you might feel down for the moment, you have the “right to be happy in life” and that possibility lies at your fingertips. You should never forget that everyone, including yourself, is a “unique person” and you can make the best of the difficult times you are going through right now. But to do so, you need a “secure yet challenging environment” that will let you discover the “potential of your brain”. She says that she sees how far you could go and she could be this environment for you. You answer that you are fine, thank you, maybe just a little bit melancholic today. As you try to leave, she apologizes and says she doesn’t want to do your good for you, but insists that you should refuse any normative labels such as “depressed” and “mentally ill” that are imposed on some people by society to belittle them. If you feel different from the rest, she says, it may be because you are “neuroatypical”, and you should cherish this feature and use it as a strength to help other people. She eventually gives you a card on which she presents herself as a “life coach”. You begin to wonder how you are truly making out in life.

Later in the day, you meet a friend whom you used to know when you were at university decades ago. You begin to chat with him, trying to improve those “social competencies” you were warned about. You both hark back to memories of how strict the teachers were at the time. Your friend says that he now realizes that it did hurt him a lot for, although he was a good student, he performed well because he feared punishment and sanctions, not because he truly liked what he was doing, and now he has the impression of having missed out on life. Then he tells you how relieved he is because things have changed: his children are now in a school where teachers are called “supporting companions”. Following the precepts of alternative pedagogies now proved by neurosciences, they let children explore and discover by themselves what they want to know and to be; they guide them by nudges to get them to learn without being taught. In this school where “non-violent communication” between everyone is the norm, the most important value, he says, is that everyone (teachers, pupils, parents) feel that they are “in tune with their true selves”.

Your old friend seems unstoppable about the merits of these groundbreaking ways of dealing with children. He argues that this is a game-changing development because children’s brains mature only when parents and teachers form a “benevolent” environment. He then advises you to foster your own future children’s “self-actualization” by reading picture books to them, even before their birth, that will help them to get the vocabulary to recognize and express their emotional states. That is the best way, he claims, to help them build a feeling of “personal achievement” later in life and a fulfilling career. Your friend’s new keyword seems to be “being and acting positive”: positive parenting, positive education, and positive thinking.

Leaving your positive friend, you enter a bar called “The inner Journey”. Watching the news on the screen, you learn that the head of state of your country recently gave a speech declaring that “mental health is the great crisis of our time”, but as we are a “resilient nation”, the next ten years will be the “decade of personal autonomy”. In the speech, parents, teachers, and mental health caregivers are presented as key players in this fundamental challenge. Their sacred mission is to help people, and especially children, help themselves to become the persons they want to be. These actors will from now on have to attend compulsory coaching sessions where they will be given clear pointers on how to make people autonomous without ever taking their place. You cannot believe your ears when you hear that psychedelic substances will be legalized next year in order to help people shake off depression and maximize their potential. “The question,” the head of state says, “is not whether you take antidepressants or psychedelic substances but how you make use of these substances, with the help of a coach, to foster your agency and to be the solution you want to see for yourself and the world”. The speech concludes by stating that during this decade, no one shall be left behind. “Thanks to neurosciences,” it is claimed, “we now know how our infinitely diverse brains work”. New empowering techniques will help overcome social inequalities, provided that each person plays their role in society. Every citizen’s job is to wish to be autonomous. The responsibility of the society is to enhance each person’s “capabilities” to be so.

The crowd in the bar applauds, and you really need a drink. The bar’s speciality is a light blond beer called “Freedom”, for which the advert promises “A rendezvous with yourself”. You order it, and the bottle comes, but with a warning on the label: “We trust you to drink with self-control. No one knows your limits better than you do”. However, looking more closely, you also see that it says consuming this product is “Forbidden for those under 18, pregnant women, and people suffering from mental health issues”. It is time to go home.

Eventually, and as if the day was not bizarre and exhausting enough, on your way back, a book displayed in a bookshop window and entitled The Contradictions of Building Autonomous Individuals catches your eye. What on earth is all this muck about autonomy and what makes it so fascinating, even for social scientists?

Individualist people: a very close tribe

The preceding sketch is less fictional than freely inspired by real events. Some of its aspects might give some readers a feeling of déja vu. One might feel that some elements are caricatures, but others are in lockstep with the reality of society as it is. Some elements might appear problematic, if not frightening, whilst others seem to be perfectly desirable. For some of us, it will look like Orwell’s 1984, for others more like the perfect lost society of Gondawa in Barjavel’s The Ice People. Reality or fiction? Utopia or dystopia? Beyond the diversity of our reactions, we might assume two elements. First, many people will feel some sense of familiarity with these situations in which personal autonomy is promoted, either because they experience it themselves or because they imagine others do. Second, evoking these situations will not leave us indifferent, as we know or feel that something important for our way of life is at stake. In a nutshell: it speaks to us.

Capabilities, agency, self-management, independence, personal achievement, self-governance, self-control, freedom, empowerment, competencies and skills, individual potential, personal responsibility, etc. As a category, autonomy rarely comes alone. It is enmeshed in what Ludwig Wittgenstein calls a language game, i.e., a set of words and expressions but also a web of social activities that find their socially shared, even if unclear, meanings in the stream of our everyday life. Sociologically, the meaning of the word “autonomy”, or even the use of this category instead of another one in this language game, is less important than the form of life to which it points, i.e., the one that we may observe in individualistic societies.

This book explores in depth some aspects, tensions, and paradoxes of living in societies that value, probably more than ever before, human beings as individuals. There are, of course, as we shall see, multiple ways of living an individualistic form of life and of making use of its language game, but it is quite easy to pinpoint some of the common-sense axioms that are widely taken for granted in such a context: autonomy is an important issue and a valuable thing; it has to do with the valorization of something that is “inside” each individual and makes them unique; our interiority is a resource of meaning and power; one should strive to discover who one truly is and make the most of an inner potential that is often hidden and unexploited; each person is, ultimately, the only one to decide what he or she wants; you should fight familial, traditional, and/or social determinisms that divert you from your own path; the role of society is to foster the autonomy of its citizens; individuals have the responsibility of being (pro)active and reducing their dependency on others as much as possible; helping someone in a relevant way does not imply doing something for them, but showing them how they can do it themselves; if everyone mobilized their own resources and lived according to what was inside them, this could have an important, certainly positive, impact on many social issues.

The contributions in this book all rest upon the observation, now commonly accepted in the scientific literature, that autonomy has become an important issue in individualistic societies (and in the social sciences studying them), to the point of becoming a “common condition”, as Alain Ehrenberg (2010) puts it. This does not mean in any way that everyone has suddenly become able to manage their own lives. Nor does it imply that every person living in an individualistic society, whatever their cultural origin or socio-economic background, is passionately excited about the ideals of autonomy. But it means that personal autonomy has become a common good and an unavoidable landmark at various levels.

In social, professional, and familial relations, it is a valued way of living one’s life and thus grounds for distinction, as well as a criterion for assigning merit and responsibilities. This is illustrated by the unceasing success of self-help content promoting individual abilities and personal responsibility (Marquis 2014), or by the triumph of the modern “from rags to riches” tale, still unchallenged, from Horatio Alger’s popular novels (such as famous Ragged Dick [1867] 2008) to social media influencers explaining how to become successful in every aspect of existence.

In another field, the foothold that the reference to autonomy has taken in international law over the last decades is striking. For example, whilst, like many fundamental texts of the time, the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (Council of Europe 1950) does not refer to autonomy directly, the European Court of Human Rights has recently interpreted some of its fundamental provisions (such as Article 2 on the right to life or Article 8 on the right to respect for private and family life) with regard to self-determination, or even “personal autonomy”, understood as “the ability to conduct one’s life in a manner of one’s own choosing”!. Interestingly, the more recent United Nations (UN) Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (2006) makes “individual autonomy, including the freedom to make one’s own choice” the very first of its General Principles (CRPD, Art. 3). At the same time, autonomy has become a legitimate claim for every person, and movements of vulnerable people such as psychiatry survivor movements, AIDS patients, and organizations of persons with disabilities want to fight oppression with the “Nothing about us without us” slogan for self-determination (see Charlton 1998).

The individual’s autonomy has also become a key preoccupation for governments and in many public policies in the last decades. The role of the state is nowadays widely considered in liberal-individualistic societies to be less that of providing people with undifferentiated protections to overcome adversity than to activate and empower people so that tailored, temporary support enables them to bounce back and retake control of their own lives (this stance is also criticized, especially in France). All in all, autonomy is a norm and a value. It is also a collective expectation for everyone, as it is taken for granted that, whatever his or her forces or weaknesses, abilities or impairments, each person has the potential, right, and duty to manage himself or herself as autonomously as possible. But do we sufficiently know what we are talking about when we are dealing with autonomy — and is the question worth asking?

Praise or criticism? Autonomy as a common-sense, philosophical, historical, and sociological subject

What is “autonomy” in actual fact? Does it even exist? Are people nowadays truly more autonomous than they were before? Can everyone actually become autonomous? Is this contemporary preoccupation with autonomy in public policies a good thing? Does it “work”? Or is it just a big, normative sham, a deceitful lie designed to dominate people, one that might even eventually lead to the collapse of society? How can we distinguish between “false” and

“true” personal autonomy? These are the kinds of question with which we are very familiar in common sense, as the ever-growing criticism of self-help techniques shows. Let us take, for example, the evocative titles of essays such as Tom Tiede’s Self-help Nation. The Long Overdue, Entirely Justified, Delightfully Hostile Guide to the Snake-oil Peddlers Who Are Sapping Our Nation’s Soul (2001), Steve Justman’s Fools Paradise. The Unreal World of Pop Psychology (2005), Steve Salerno’s Sham: How the Self-Help Movements Made America Helpless (2006), etc.

Individual autonomy and other categories have this characteristic of sacred issues: they have a great power of attraction, but they also create apprehensions and attract criticism. We may fear not being able to make it and missing out one’s own life, but we may also worry about unintended consequences and paradoxes such as the fact that autonomy has become a social norm. The essays cited above often revolve around two ideas. First, if self-help actually made people more autonomous, we should know it by now. “Surely it is the inefficacy, not the efficacy, of self-help that keeps the genre going” (Justman 2005, 6). Second, self-help books are not only ineffectual but also can eventually make people /ess autonomous by having them rely on experts or public authorities instead of trusting themselves or by transforming their lives into lives of boring perpetual self-examination. This kind of criticism has been heard by self-help book authors who, at least in France, have now endorsed criticisms of forms of socially expected autonomy (understood as a commercial sham or as an expectation of performance weighing heavily on the individual) — but only to promote another, true form of individual autonomy as a way of “really being oneself” (see, for example, books by best-selling author and psychiatrist Christophe André 2009). What is remarkable in such controversies is that the relevance of autonomy per se is never in question: only certain forms, definitions, or paths to get to it are seen as problematic. As Alain Ehrenberg (2010) has shown, valuing and criticism of autonomy move forward hand in hand in individualistic societies.

Whilst visible in common-sense discussions, these kinds of worries are probably nowhere more present than in academic circles in the social sciences and humanities, where many scholars seem to have endorsed the mission to tell some truths about personal autonomy and the form of life it implies — most often from a critical perspective. Given a global trend of valuing personal autonomy, approaching this category in a positivist way (does it actually exist? what is it exactly?) or evaluative way (is it good or bad?) is of course extremely tempting and has given birth to major works in both philosophy and the social sciences. But where has it led us?

Autonomy as a philosophical UFO

In the history of philosophy, and moral philosophy in particular, the concept of autonomy is largely derived from the Kantian perspective (Hill 1991; Korsgaard 1996; Schneewind 1998). Seen from this angle, the autonomous individual is someone who is not simply subject to his or her inclinations, but whose will is guided by the exercise of reason and by self-command, i.e., being able to bend the will to moral duties. Against this conception of autonomy, based on the idea of a subject who is fully conscious, rational, and free to self-determine his or her actions, the philosophical tradition that came after Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud set out to criticize the so-called “philosophies of the subject”, suspiciously highlighting the illusion of a (modern) subject entirely responsible for controlling his or her actions and emphasizing the fact that the reasons for his or her actions are largely independent of the subject’s conscious will.

Another wave of even more radical critiques of the figure of the autonomous, self-governing individual surfaced in the 20th century in the wake of Ludwig Wittgenstein and other philosophers inspired by his work. In this profoundly anti-internalist perspective, the focus is not on determinations hindering individual autonomy, but rather on the very fact that any conception of autonomy as self-foundation is logically impossible. Indeed, as anthropologist Veena Das (1998) shows regarding suffering, the public dimension of human life always takes precedence over the private dimension: in order to live and to express one’s own feelings, one has to rely on a public language, no matter how private and intimate these feelings might seem. Autonomy, in this view, paradoxically lies in the learning of external rules, which is an essential condition of any action that is generally considered to be “individual” (Descombes 2005).

Moreover, as Joan Tronto (1993), Iris Murdoch (2013), Eva Kittay (2011), and many other scholars borrowing from the philosophy of care or feminist theories have shown, the dominant liberal perspective on autonomy, crystallized in the heroic figure of the action man, strongly tends to obliterate the indispensable, and often invisible, human, social, and material aids that allow any one of us to say something to the effect of “I am conducting a brilliant professional career” (see Paperman and Laugier 2020). One should not focus on an abstract capacity or right to decide what is good for oneself. Rather, one should pay attention to the very concrete situational parameters that determine the capabilities of a person, i.e., the actual possibility for the person to achieve what matters to him or her (Nussbaum 2011).

In a nutshell, it is fair to say, as philosopher Vincent Descombes (2013) puts it, that much Western philosophical and political thought has tried, over at least a century, to reveal autonomy as an insufficient, biased, problematic, if not simply false, category. What is more, for those in social sciences and humanities who wish to safeguard autonomy as a value or category, all hopes of building an encompassing definition or an integrated theory have until now foundered against the double status of autonomy as an etic (scholarly) and an emic (common sense) category. There is, what is more, an indisputable diversity of academic perspectives (opposing, for example, those for whom autonomy is a substantial value that has to do with the definition of a life worth living it and those for whom autonomy is, above all, a matter of procedures and possibilities of choice). There is also, and above all, an apparently unsurpassable multiplicity of practical uses of autonomy, especially with regard to people whose autonomy is considered problematic. A recently published book entitled Autonomy and Mental Disorder (Radoilska 2012) clearly illustrates some of the shortcomings of a state of the art about autonomy that can be summarized as follows: we have the intellectual tools to identify many conceptual, ethical, and practical problems regarding autonomy, but we do not have any viable solution to surmount them.

The intricate roots of autonomy

One may then ask why, as individuals, groups, and societies, we have come to value so much a belief that at best seems to act as an empty shell and at worst is a problematic chimera? How has this become a landmark of an individualistic way of life? Philosopher Charles Taylor insists on the need to trace the origin of the way we “feel the demands to freedom and self-rule as axiomatically justified” (Taylor 1989, 495), at least in the beginning of the modern period, with its Deist, Enlightenment, and Romantic movements that have, in various ways, delved into the individual’s inner self. Sociologists such as Max Weber (1967) and Louis Dumont (1985) propose that we consider that the origin of individualism and its accent on the value of self-determination is to be found in even more ancient sources, such as the invention of “subjective rights” in the Middle Ages (Occam) or even the monotheistic religions of Christianity and (ancient) Judaism.

Many historians have insisted on the importance of the melting pot that was America during the last four centuries, where Protestantism, liberalism, capitalism, Emerson’s transcendentalist philosophy on the “divine sufficiency of the individual”, James’s pragmatism, and Quimby’s New Thought movement met the fascination for Mesmer’s “animal magnetism”, Eddy’s Christian Science curing the mind and the body, Coué’s method, Freud’s 1909 Conferences at Clark University (and the theories of those, such as Jung, who followed and then broke with him), Peale’s 1952 Power of Positive Thinking, Maslow’s pyramid of the human needs, and techniques and movements such as those developed in the Californian Esalen Institute, to name just a few of the elements in the mix (see inter alia Hale 1971; Hewitt 1998; Illouz 2008). These ingredients, among many others, have been interpreted as progressively giving birth to an unprecedented preoccupation with the self, termed the (third) “Great Awakening” by essayist Tom Wolfe, that was particularly visible in the 1970s’ “‘Me’ Decade” (Wolfe 1976). Other scholars also link the impressive success of Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi’s positive psychology at the beginning of the 21st century to this breeding ground (Cederstrôm 2018).

But whatever happened in the United States should definitely not be interpreted as the sole starting impulse in modern history of a hypothetical wave of American individualistic way of life that gradually conquered the world. Indeed, other genealogies exist in various countries. In France and continental

Europe more generally, many social scientists have given a prominent role to actors in the last three centuries who claimed to explore, to correct, or to cure the human mind, its madness, and its suffering. Among these actors, religious movements and therapeutic figures from Mesmer to contemporary (neuro)psychiatrists via Freud or French alienists are considered to have played an important role in delving into modern individuals’ interiority; see, for example, the writings of historians Henri Ellenberger (1970) and Hervé Guillemain (2016), psychiatrist Gladys Swain (1994), philosopher Pierre- Henri Castel (2011, 2012), and more recently sociologist Nicolas Henckes and historian Benoit Majerus (2022).

Other scholars studied how things unfolded during the same period in England, when psychology (and especially scientific psychology) was gaining ground, whilst being also linked to programmes for measuring individuals’ and groups’ health (Rose 1985). But above all, one must not forget that the expression “self-help” was coined by author Samuel Smiles in Victorian England, not the United States. In 1859, Smiles published a book titled Self-help, with Illustrations of Character, Conduct and Perseverance, of which 250,000 copies were sold (after having initially been rejected by the newly founded publisher Routledge!) in which he wrote: