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The Angels Won’t Help You is a book about the uniqueness and primacy of help, particularly in relation to care, love, and caritas. It contains reflections, memoir, and prose poetry, with an emphasis on psycho-philosophical examinations of help. In trying to understand help, especially in the ways that it is not a synonym for care, Bowker turns to diverse sources and topics, including treatments of children in a helpless world, as featured in the literature of Kathy Acker and Jerzy Kosiński, a first-person account of help in psychiatric hospitals, an analysis of the phenomenon of Japanese hikikomori (“shutting oneself in”), anxiety and helplessness, an exploration of the nature of help and helplessness in Wilfred Bion’s “Attacks on Linking,” a rethinking of trauma in light of the circuital structure of the self, and more. M.H. Bowker is a professor in psychoanalytic political theory at SUNY, the University at Buffalo.