Man, the Manipulator

Shostrom, an American psychotherapist whose practice drew on a wide range of theory and research, argues that manipulation is not the vice of a few difficult people but the ordinary condition of modern life. On his account most people handle others as objects, using a repertoire of learned styles to extract approval, control or safety, and they do this because they distrust themselves and cannot bear to be seen as they are. The book's subtitle names its arc, an inner journey out of manipulation and towards actualization. Actualizing, in Shostrom's humanistic vocabulary, means owning one's own feelings, needs and weaknesses rather than staging them for effect, and meeting another person as a person rather than a means. The cure is therefore not better technique but honesty, expressed in the willingness to be direct about anger, affection, dependence and strength alike. The argument sits within the broader self-realization tradition Shostrom worked in, the same concerns that produced his Personal Orientation Inventory, an instrument designed to measure factors related to self-actualization.

Written from the catalogue record for the 1967 Abingdon edition at the Internet Archive, with the Wikipedia article on Everett Shostrom.

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