"We also got free movies there and self-help tapes," Mr. Henchen said (savings: $550 to $700 a year).

Eddie drives off, listening to a self-help tape: "I'm the best me I can be.

Thus careful studies of "the power of subliminal self-help tapes...showed that their content had no real effect...But that's not what the participants thought."

They had even listened to self-help tapes on the drive to midtown Manhattan yesterday to, as Mrs. Jaeger put it, "give us a push."

Instructional and educational recordings came first, followed by self-help tapes and then by literature.

The technology of today's self-help tapes has not changed much over the years.

Frustrated, he turned to self-help tapes and books on memory enhancement.

"Bill" confessed that he had dabbled with 12-step, self-help tapes in his quest to learn "what's it all about."

Interestingly, Robard's self-help tapes are not his first entrepreneurial endeavor.

The latest new-age consumer products are not crystals or self-help tapes or Shirley MacLaine books; they are movies.