Such Good Friends

We must realize that we have a choice: we are responsible for our own good time...

When you do something you are proud of, dwell on it a little, praise yourself for it, relish the experience, take it in.

Homilies like these, delivered by two little-known Manhattan psychoanalysts, fill a 54-page book that is selling at the rate of 10,000 a week. How to Be Your Own Best Friend (Random House; $4.95) is indeed heralded by some of its 250,000 readers as this year's Jonathan Livingston Seagull, promising yet another flight to happiness.

The book has been touted by showbiz types like Actor Anthony Perkins, Columnist Rex Reed and Playwright Neil Simon (if he's gloomy, he says, he downs it twice a day like a pill, with a glass of water). To be sure, some of these enthusiasts whose advertised endorsements boosted the book's sales happen to be patients of Mildred Newman and Bernard Berkowitz--the husband-and-wife team who wrote the book with the help of a friend, Jean Owen. But the bestseller obviously has other less prejudiced fans as well. "It seems like something a good friend would say to you," explains Bonny Simmons, a California real estate broker. Another reader credits How to Be Your Own Best Friend with enabling her to pass her driver's test after having flunked it seven times.

As its title suggests, the book is a psychiatric pep talk in the long tradition of self-help books that provide what Psychiatrist Karl Menninger once called "bibliotherapy." Children used to learn how to live from their parents, notes Herbert C. Kelman, professor of social ethics at Harvard. But now "every generation is on its own and often seeks a packaged way of acquiring wisdom."

Gentle Persuasion. The Berkowitz-Newman brand of wisdom is vaguely Adlerian (Berkowitz attended the Alfred Adler Institute after taking his Ph.D. at New York University). Adler invented the term inferiority complex, and the book is aimed at people with shaky selfesteem. As Adler did, it recommends strengthening the ego and urges self-determination. Sometimes, at least. Actually the authors want to have it both ways: "When you try to do it all out of will power, you are not treating yourself with respect. You are making the assumption that change has to be imposed from above, that your self doesn't have its own impulse to do better." But they add: "You need to learn to work with yourself, to use your will power on the side of yourself. Of course, that doesn't mean you can't use some gentle persuasion."

Manhattan Psychiatrist James Baxter argues that such roundabout reasoning is contradictory. Nevertheless, he says, the book is appealing because "a bedrock of respect for oneself is essential, and today we are rampant with self-recrimination. The U.S. is having a crisis of conscience unparalleled since the Civil War."

Gary Schwartz, assistant professor of psychology at Harvard, agrees that the tenor of the times makes people long for "more control over their own lives. Like biofeedback, the book promises a way to achieve that control." Adds Mildred Lerner, past president of the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis: "In today's alienated society, nobody's got a best friend. People want a way to nurture themselves."

Not everyone, however. Many people who got the book as a Christmas present found it juvenile, boring or simplistic. Psychiatrists, too, object to its superficiality. Many of them complain that it says too little about unconscious motivation and that it implies that a few hours of reading will substitute for years of psychotherapy. But generally it is regarded as a harmless way to invest $4.95. Says David Orlinsky, a University of Chicago psychologist: "It's cheaper than tranquilizers. Why shouldn't publishers as well as pharmaceutical houses make money?"

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