The article ”Private Practices, Public Confessions” (June 14) confirms the opinions I have had since 1988, when my husband and I were on a panel on alcoholism on the ”Oprah” show. We both feel, as the article stated, that it is an odd program that rewards people for calling themselves helpless, childish, addicted and diseased.
I went through the whole codependency thing in groups and in hospitals. It wasn`t until I felt powerful that I got better. My husband said that saying he was sick every day at a meeting made him feel even more helpless.
But what is most disturbing is using testimony as a matter of truth. This is a dangerous thing, and the statement in the story that testimony has become a substitute for thinking is extremely scary.
GAIL PAVLIK, Chicago
I found ”Private Practices, Public Confessions” tremendously offensive. Author Wendy Kaminer`s vitriolic dislike of recovery movements, personal confession, talk shows, people with problems and reality in general was biased, bigoted and completely unfair.
For a woman who seems amazed that people like to talk about themselves, she certainly has written a dandy little piece that elevates her opinion to fact-or, even worse, to revelation.
Creating a bunch of straw men and setting them on fire with her midbrow wit is an easy way to avoid making a fact-based argument against a movement from which millions of people claim they have benefited.
THOMAS M. PURCELL, Chicago
Thank you, God, for clever, intelligent and articulate human beings like Wendy Kaminer. I love talk shows, but when the ”freakish” true confessions come on, the TV goes off.
PAULINE M. WISEMAN, Palos Park
Wendy Kaminer`s tone in ”Private Practices, Public Confessions” was smug, elitist and much too self-assured on a topic with which she apparently has only a surface acquaintance.
Certainly, the recovery movement is deserving at times of some serious criticism, but Kaminer`s approach was not much different from using a sawed-off shotgun to hunt sparrows.
The vernacular of the recovery movement is a reflection of a new subculture in America. Like all social trends, the movement is subject to its own self-indulgences and tangents. It needs to be pointed out that its language is the language of the clinical therapist brought to a popularized level.
Criticism should confine itself to the marginal areas where the recovery movement has shown excess, while seeking to meet the participants in the recovery movement with greater understanding.
DANIEL MCFEELEY, Kankakee
Ms. Kaminer is a great critic of popular culture (but) she herself has given us a specimen of popular culture: the view-with-alarm article. The characterics of such articles are a trumped-up menace, guilt by association, prejudgment, exaggeration and distortion, and they are as much formula-driven as the self-help books she sneers at.
People turn to support groups for help, not out of some sick need to let their hair down in front of a bunch of strangers but because friends and family often do not or will not understand their problem.
I couldn`t help contrasting Ms. Kaminer`s article with the profile of paleontologist Paul Sereno (”Dinosaur Man”) in the same issue. Sereno makes wonderful discoveries and shares them with the rest of us. Kaminer misrepresents other people`s efforts to improve themselves and asks us to look down our noses along with her.
I think it`s self-evident whose work is more worthwhile.
ROBER SHEA, Glencoe
