Phil McGraw

Phil McGraw published Self Matters in 2001 through Free Press, the third of his self-help titles after Life Strategies and Relationship Rescue, and the year before the daytime programme began. Its subject is what he calls the authentic self, the version of a person he argues gets buried under other people's expectations, and the book is built around written exercises meant to dig it back out. He holds a doctorate in clinical psychology taken in 1979, worked in practice and in trial consulting in Texas for about two decades, and let his Texas licence lapse in 2006 once television left no room for it. The books and the programme were sold alongside each other throughout, each carrying the other.