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A review by isheekagoswami
How to Develop Emotional Health by Oliver James
1.0
This book is not about how to develop emotional health. Rather, its entire thesis is that everything that happens to us in childhood affects our emotional health as adults, which seems to imply that we have little to no control over our emotional health. If we do, the author certainly didn’t trouble himself to give us any advice on it. He just rambled incessantly and, at times, incoherently, about how we all become our parents. Nothing useful there.
There were some parts of this book that made no sense at all. In one breath, James speaks of the importance of being authentic and, in another, says we need only seem to be sincere at work in order to enjoy our careers. James seems to think that not striving for academic or professional success is emotionally healthy, while being ambitious is unhealthy. At pages 108-110, he gives a couple of “triumphant” examples of successful wives and mothers: one, a woman who married and had children with a man she wasn’t in love with, and the other a woman whose husband was never around. All of these nonsensical anecdotes with no evidence or consistency add up to a frustrating and frankly useless book. It reads like a hastily written essay by a first year uni student and contains, I think, misleading and potentially damaging content about how to engage with our pasts and set up a better future for ourselves.
There were some parts of this book that made no sense at all. In one breath, James speaks of the importance of being authentic and, in another, says we need only seem to be sincere at work in order to enjoy our careers. James seems to think that not striving for academic or professional success is emotionally healthy, while being ambitious is unhealthy. At pages 108-110, he gives a couple of “triumphant” examples of successful wives and mothers: one, a woman who married and had children with a man she wasn’t in love with, and the other a woman whose husband was never around. All of these nonsensical anecdotes with no evidence or consistency add up to a frustrating and frankly useless book. It reads like a hastily written essay by a first year uni student and contains, I think, misleading and potentially damaging content about how to engage with our pasts and set up a better future for ourselves.