Includes bibliographical references ([311]-326) and index.

"Beginning with the example of a "Mind Cure" developed by mid-nineteenth-century clockmaker Phineas P. Quimby, Moskowitz explains how Americans' growing fascination with therapy led them to adopt new kinds of reform - including, at the turn of the twentieth century, provisions for psychological services in prisons, courts, hospitals, and schools. Depression-era divorce rates prompted colleges and high schools to offer courses on marital happiness and produced a new marriage-counseling industry. During World War II, Moskowitz shows, the army devoted unprecedented energy to a soldier's "psychological readiness for combat." Moskowitz also explores more recent developments, including Cold War-era psychological assumptions of magazine campaigns that targeted unhappy housewives. She confronts the social protest movements in the 60s and the explosion of 70s self-help fads that continue to the present." "In a study that encompasses all aspects of American society - from television talk shows to the criminal justice system, from office politics to world politics - Moskowitz identifies a debilitating "sense of self" that is intimately bound up with the major developments of the twentieth century."--Jacket.

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