Thin selves: popular psychology and the transnational moral grammar of self-identity

This article explores popular psychology as a transnational moral grammar. Academic debates have been sharply critical of popular psychology, and they have emphasised its association with neoliberal capitalism’s narratives of social relationships. However, scholarship on popular psychology has focused on the Global Northwest. The transnational diffusion of popular psychology remains poorly understood, as do its implications for experiences of self-identity in the Global South. This article conceptualises popular psychology as a moral grammar of transnational scale, whose diffusion is closely associated with the globalisation of neoliberal developmental models. Its argument is grounded in an analysis of the transnational market for self-help books. Drawing on publishing statistics, it documents the transnational circulation and consumption of self-help books. Through ethnographic research in Trinidad it then explores how some female readers in drawing on self-help books to account for their experiences of everyday life against the backdrop of neoliberal structural adjustment, personal insecurity and already existing local socio-cultural traditions of self-help instantiate a moral grammar of transnational popular psychology in potentially syncretic forms.