'Self-help, please take one' (as seen scribbled above a bog roll dispenser, Reading, UK)

Been watching this via BBC iPlayer. Whether it's 'Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway', 'The Power of Now', 'The Highly Sensitive Person' or even texts like Covey's 'Seven Habits of Highly Effective People', I am dubious. Sure, there are some basic truths in each of them, but I guess I object to them being dressed up and then sold on to those desperate for a quick fix.

OK, so which ones have I read? Well, I never read the copies of 'The Power of Now' or 'The Highly Sensitive Person' I was given by two ex girlfriends. I tried to read Covey but opted to listen to the audiobook version (needs some knob jokes), rapidly returning to Drucker - much of the basic contents of Covey's work can be found in Peter Drucker's 1966 text 'The Effective Executive'.

As part of my MBA, as I read widely (and tangentially) around the syllabus (which includes personal development, Myers-Briggs, etc), I have read 'Jonathan Livingston Seagull' and the dreadfully written 'The Monk who Sold his Ferrari' (the guy should have used a ghost writer, its so wooden). I also read, back in 1994, Dale Carnegie's 'How to Win Friends and Influence People' as part of an in-house training course. I hated every moment of it, although nothing he wrote was fundamentally knobby (apart from the title).

I wonder how many self-help authors recommend writing a self-help book as your path to fame & riches?

But at the same time, I think of Freud, Jung, Frankl, psychoanalysis, cognitive psychology and the emerging field of positive psychology.

As an analyst said in the Yentob documentary, some things work for some people sometimes. So I shouldn't make light of self-help, sorry.

But this is a distraction. I am also thinking about the George Melly documentary last weekend at the same time as I think of my father.

Get thee on a couch Freud, and take me, take me, take me.