Representações de si no discurso de manuais de aconselhamento comportamental: elaboração e gestão de éthe na literatura de autoajuda

Abstract

Advice books are among the most sought-after editorial productions today. Often referred to as self-help, these works share the common goal of offering themselves as conduct guides to help readers face life’s dilemmas. Our primary objective with this research was to examine how self-images, or éthe (Amossy, 2016; Maingueneau, 2008, 2013a, 2020), are constructed and related to one another in the discourse of three Brazilian advice books, having anxiety as the central theme. The analysis was guided by global semantics (Maingueneau, 2005), together with the study of discourse organization modes (Charaudeau, 2009) and other contributions from French discourse analysis, as well as Brazilian studies on this subject (Brunelli, 2004, 2005; Sobral, 2006; Rüdiger, 2010; Leite, 2019). The research highlighted the coexistence of different éthe in the manuals examined, demonstrating how the construction of self-images permeates all discourse levels within global semantics. In Amaral (2023), the convergence between the éthos of a friend and that of a compassionate psychotherapist was observed, while in Cury (2014), the conflict between a confident éthos and a rushed, anxious tone revealed a significant disjunction. Overall, we observed that the éthos said is quite common in advice manuals and, in most cases, reinforces the éthos shown. In agreement with Furlan (2014), we found that scenography plays a central role in supporting self-representations, though éthos can maintain a certain degree of autonomy from this dimension. This is particularly evident in Zandoná (2018), in which the construction of a psychotherapeutic spatiality does not directly imply the manifestation of a psychotherapist’s éthos The éthos of a counselor, even when rejected in the discursive materiality, emerges as the dominant self-image in the analyzed manuals, reaffirming the thesis that counseling books constitute a specific generic scene, although they mobilize multiple scenographies and stylistic-compositional strategies from other stabilized discursive practices, such as proverbs, psychotherapy sessions, psychological evaluation consultations, religious sermons, informal conversations and coaching conferences. The complexity of this interaction between different scenographies and self-images in counseling discourse suggests that these books not only instruct behavior, but also generate self-representations situated in broader discursive contexts, linking them to various forms of socio-communicative interaction.