They F*** You Up
by Oliver James
Bloomsbury £16.99, pp370

Analysis and all its weaker offspring seductively gives us a chance to look at the mess of our lives and find a path through it, a narrative that will explain us to ourselves.

Where we thought there was randomness, a pattern emerges; where we thought there was senselessness, some kind of a meaning. This is how I became who I am. And while this often painful self-exploration can be liberating, shining a light into dark places, turning ghosts into memories, and offering the chance to take responsibility for your own life by comprehending it, it can also do more or less the opposite by encouraging the sense of helplessness and self-pity, of being someone else's victim. You can relive the hurt of your past and blame others for what has gone wrong.

And, of course, the family is where life starts to go wrong - the great drama (tragedy, comedy, farce) we are all caught up in. We are all susceptible to Oliver James's second-hand title, in spite of the gutted verb, because almost all of us feel, deep down, that - through our position in the family, the way our mother or father treated us, the way we were forced into this role or refused that one, the way they favoured the other sibling, the way they did not understand, the way they manipulated us, argued with us, disapproved of us, were too ambitious for us, were not fair, were not just, were not kind, were not looking properly - it is true.

When we become intimate with people, we swap stories about families; tales of how we became the person we are and of how life is not fair. And we are right, we come into the world open and endlessly possible and gradually get chipped into our own shape and life is not fair. To feel that we have suffered is the easy route to feeling we are somehow heroic.

James's insistence that his book is addressed to us as children, not as parents, perpetuates this sense of the self as a victim not a perpetrator.

They F*** You Up (and is there something deeply bizarre about a psychology book that does not dare speak the word it is using?) uneasily mixes genres. There is a bit of autobiography (James, in his stories of himself as a lazy child, a 'sluttish' student, presents himself as one of us; an ordinary bloke). A bit of trashy instant analysis of the more obviously dysfunctional celebrities (Mia Farrow, Woody Allen, Prince Charles, Paula Yates). A bit of science: James gallops through the arguments about the influence on us of genes and of the environment and comes down firmly on the side of the environment, which he sees as a liberation from biological determinism and the conservative view that the bad are bad, the mad mad, the sad sad (he is interesting on schizophrenia and identical twins; a bit obvious on the inheritances of violence and abuse). A bit of watered down psycho-analytic theory: he brings on Freud (whom he turns into a benign, blandly uncontroversial presence), RD Laing, John Bowlby, Alice Miller, all the traditionally anthologised, old-fashioned favourites with their alarming bits removed.

He loves talking about 'scripts' (the scripts of our life, which we can learn to edit and even rewrite), 'stories' (the stories we tell ourselves and the stories others tell about us), 'maps' (our lovemaps, which we get lost in), 'dramas'. And he relies heavily on truisms, such as the asterisked Larkin.

He also wrenches the book into a self-help manual, asking us to categorise ourselves (wobbler or clinger, punitive or weak?) and encouraging us to do an 'emotional audit' at the end of each chapter. I have to warn you this involves some homework. You may need a friend for a guinea pig and you might have to ask your parents for information. And even if you are diligent, you will not be rewarded by the tacky pleasures of a magazine questionnaire that classes you as sensitive and shy, or tells you if your husband is having an affair.

What is more, in my case, it does not work: my books were wildly unbalanced by the end of the audit. I am a wobbler and a clinger; I am punitive and weak; I fear I have a borderline personality disorder or two; my esteem is low yet I can be grandiose. I am everything and nothing; the book slides past.

It is hard to disagree with much of what James is saying, partly because it is neither new or surprising. It is easily digestible yet stale. He is amiable, dutiful, tame, benevolent, lacklustre; he stays on the surface of his subject, underneath which such passions rage, and such pleasures. Pleasure is largely absent from his book, as is illumination or danger. At one point, he tells us: 'Please believe me when I say that the last thing I want to do is stir up trouble.' He should want to stir up trouble. He has a great fire of a subject, which he has damped down to its last embers.