Category: Zombies

This entry is 2005 review of a 2002 self help book. I co-published original review at Blogcritics. I wrote it to follow up on my entry about Pyschology in Recovery and look at some ideas in modern psychology. It includes some ideas on fighting depression and pessimism and leading a happy life. I also noticed this review by Daniel Pick, at the Guardian Online in March 2005, of books about happiness.

Updating in 2019, a long read on Positive Psychology in Vox.

Martin Seligman is the principal advocate of Positive Psychology. In 1998 he took on what he describes as a mission of creating a scientific movement for Positive psychology. In 2002 Simon & Schuster published his self-help book “Authentic Happiness”, which is subtitled “Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment”.
It is written in a congenial, conversational style, and it is full of personal anecdotes and stories. There are tests in the book and at the companion web site for readers to assess their positive and negative affect, happiness, personal strengths and personality traits. There are rules for happy living. There are platitudes and inspirational lessons. It is an average self-help book by any earnest and cheerful person who happen to a successful and a psychologist. It is much better than most of the books on the market. It is well-grounded in empirical research and moral philosophy and it has some useful advice about responding to success and failure and maintaining balance and perspective.

Dr. Seligman explains his tests and his rules in some detail by reference to various academic work, and he seems to be using those parts of the book to explain and promote positive psychology. He strongly believes that psychology is a scientific pursuit as well as a therapeutic process. He only hints at some of the profession’s challenges and problems. Psychology tries to be a learned profession, with high educational and professional standards. It is subject to strong economic forces. It is unpopular with insurers and HMO’s and there is increasing competition from all kinds of counsellors and therapists – many of whom have not had an expensive education – willing to indulge clients who expect a meaningful and emotional course of therapy. He mentions popular psychology indirectly a few times, noting that the American public has become attuned to the idea that therapy should be intense and emotional and produce strong feelings.
He presents Positive psychology as a new idea, although it seems more accurately to be and effort to reform humanistic psychology. The terminology of humanism has become somewhat controversial, and has no promotional traction. Like humanistic psychology, popular psychology surveys the way people report their emotions and tries to generalize into a system of moral rules. Like humanistic psychology, the system brings into play classical philosophical ideals of right living and modern existential philosophy. Dr. Seligman generally presents himself as a rational and scientific thinker, and avoids emotionalism.   He believes that emotions are real, and that psychology’s role is to help people live with them.

Positive psychology presents nicely to people sensitized to the power of positive thinking in business and advertising. It plays very well with people who like to dream about unlocking their human potential for bliss. Its emphasis on optimism, happiness, religions and spirituality will play well with fans of popular psychology and eclectic spirituality, although Dr. Seligman is essentially hostile to many trends in popular psychology. On the other hand, its emphasis on religion, character and the virtues will appeal to social conservatives. Dr. Seligman walks an intellectual high wire through this book, and it’s quite a show. He talks like the pc liberal academic he is, but he comes back repeatedly to some classical moral ideas.

Dr. Seligman spends several pages on the history of academic and clinical psychology in American since World War II. He sees it as a counselling profession that became tied to a disease-and-cure model of mental illness, which has paid too little attention to the helping people to be happy. He suggests that it has reached its useful limits and needs to focus itself on helping people feel better by being better, stronger, more virtuous people.
He criticizes Freudian and other psychodynamic theories of the emotions on several grounds. He thinks those theories aren’t scientific or supported by evidence. He thinks the methodology of sifting memories of the past to find the source of present feelings is essentially negative and fruitless. It encourages people to dwell on their feelings instead of working to change how they feel, it tends to let people blame others, and it can create a sense of pessimism and hopelessness. In some cases it seems to reinforce the emotional problems. He feels that emotion and cognition work together, and that people probably have a limited emotional range, with some people being naturally more optimistic, pessimistic and emotionally charged. He also feels that people can adapt.

He suggests that cognitive psychology has helped to discredit Freudian theories, and that several techniques for maintaining positive emotion have come out of the cognitive approach. He is generally critical of behavioural, social and environmental ideas about happiness. He covers some of the research on emotions and happiness and the social factors that promote happiness – he suggests that money, health, age, education, race, climate and gender are not that important. The factors that are more important are social connections, romance or a good marriage, membership in a religious community – and optimistic beliefs about the self and the world, including religious beliefs.

He has three chapters on optimism and pessimism regarding the past, the future and the present. He says that people can help themselves be happy by not dwelling on past hurts and grievances, and by working to forgive past trespasses. He rejects positive thinking and happy self talk as basically useless in increasing happiness. He thinks that people should assess successes and setbacks realistically. What is important in reacting to a setback is to recognize that the failure is not pervasive or permanent, and to reason through and around it, to adapt, and to react in a positive and resilient way. He says that depressed people interpret setbacks as pervasive and persistent, which handicaps them from responding and moving on.
In dealing with the present, he points out that people get used to pleasure and become desensitized. He suggests various strategies to help savour an experience and to ensure that good experiences hold their reward. He implicitly rejects the idea that we can find pleasure or happiness in seeing the latest movie with the best special effects or most tragic romantic entanglements or by shopping for the newest and the latest. Pleasure fades. He favours finding things you like and things that are good and useful, and holding on to them. He favours using the principles of Flow to find and hold the rewards of the moment and to be happy. He is against being absorbed in your feelings, or worrying about your self-esteem. He says self-absorbed thinking is a sign of depression.

He devotes a large part of the book to discussing character and virtue. His history of the rise and fall of these notions in American culture is probably shaky, but he has a useful chapter on cross-cultural research into behavioural attributes that are valued universally. He refers to the key strengths as wisdom, courage, love, justice, temperance and spirituality. He suggests that psychology’s real work lies in identifying ways to help people achieve these strengths.

At the beginning of the book, positive psychology sounds like a lot of other self-help systems to help people identify and “fulfil” their “potential”, but Dr. Seligman’s emphasis is on working with real strengths that have a real connection to individual happiness and social justice. He really does go back to the ideas of the classical philosophers – living the examined life, enjoying the experiences of life in moderation, cultivating the virtues.
He has a few chapters on applying positive psychology in the workplace, in relationships, and in child care. These chapters are somewhat general, and tend to be more fluffy than they need to be. Dr. Seligman recognizes that religion is important, but he doesn’t have much to say about it. He acknowledges the research that shows that religious people tend to be healthier and happier, and he recognizes that most people hold many kinds of beliefs on faith. He seems to have a hard time with the anti-intellectual tendencies of American fundamentalism. He seems to favour a personal and speculative approach to spirituality. He seems to reject the Freudian perspective that religion is necessarily a sign of emotional or intellectual weakness.

He is engaging in revisionist history about culture and ideas, and promoting and monetizing his theory. The idea that there is more to psychology than validating feelings and blaming the world for problems is appealing. The idea of that happiness lies in restraint, civility and virtuous behaviour is, coming from a modern psychologist, almost revolutionary.

Overall, and looking back from 2019, Seligman is just another author-guru selling books into the market.

The clever and ironic title of this article in the current issue of First Things magazine, caught my attention. Paul C. Vitz, Emeritus Professor of Pyschology at New York University discusses “positive psychology”, a movement or approach identified by Martin Seligman, a former president of the American Psychological Association. I borrowed Dr. Seligman’s book Authentic Happiness from the library. He started to promote positive psychology in 1998, in concert with Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, the author of “Flow” and some others.
Dr. Vitz has been a critic of popular psychology and a firm critic of major trends within professional psychology. The relationship between religion and psychology has been one of the main themes in his work.
This article was published in a conservative Catholic magazine, and Dr. Vitz’s agenda and perspective are predictable. He is a socially conservative, orthodox Catholic critic of modernity. His technique is identifying and demolishing the cultural implications of modernity in therapeutic clinical psychology, popular psychology and areas of public discourse influenced by modern psychology. His analysis of the failing of modern psychology is interesting and useful. He deconstruct modern psychology as adeptly as an any of the modern post-structuralists. However his program is to restore the traditional values and virtues of the Hebrew bible, the early Christians, the neo-Platonists, and the medieval Scholastics. Catholics have centuries of practice deconstructing the beliefs of pagans, Gnostics, Jews,Muslims, heretics, schismatics, Protestants, deists, agnostics, atheists, secularists, humanists, Communists, socialists, liberals, modernists, post-modernists, feminists, and I could go on. The orthodox and traditional teaching of the Catholic church tend to call the value of psychology into question – it has specific ways of analyzing and judging behaviour that are inconsistent with Catholic anthropology and Catholic moral teachings. And the Church, for the orthodox, has to be right about everything.
His deconstruction of modern psychology is still creditable. He divides modern psychology into three main areas, experimental, test-and-measurement, and therapeutic, and looks at the coherence and scientific status of each area. Experimental psychology has two main parts. Physiological psychology or neuroscience is on solid ground as a biological science. Cognitive psychology has also evolved into a relatively hard science focussing on measureable, verifiable, empirically proven events. The second main area, test-and-measurement, has become a statistically oriented social science. Therapeutic psychology or psychotherapy, on the other hand, is not a science. He observes that the work of Freud, Jung and Adler, which had scientific pretensions, has fallen out of favour in American graduate schools. He says that the founders of psychotherapy made a serious categorical mistake in comparing psychology to medical science. He observes that psychotherapists have drawn various metaphors for the way the mind works from physics, chemistry, biology, computer science and literature, and that psychology has not been able to develop its own coherent theory of intelligence, emotion and the mind. The prevailing models of psychotherapy are based in the humanities, among other hermeneutic disciplines. It is a sub-discipline of philosophy or an applied philosophy of life, administered or taught by people who call themselves professional therapists.
This is a powerful critique. Modern psychology tries to define the cultural values of modern urban Western civilization, as interpreted by clinical psychologists, as “healthy” thereby privileging those values over other ethical values. It is an ethical, rather than a therapeutic program. Michel Foucault would agree with him, although perhaps Dr. Vitz would be horrified to find himself in Foucault’s company.
He discusses positive psychology favourably. It emphasizes working for happiness and well-being by developing positive character traits and virtues. It is a major step away from current models of therapy which are focussed on the client’s memories and feelings, and which disregard the way a person affects others. Modern therapy is based on a notion of recovery from trauma – and relatively few clients have had real traumas. Dr. Vitz is a severe critic of the idea that events that diminish self-esteem constitute trauma. They are painful, but that’s not trauma. He is a harsh critic of modern educational psychology and the pre-occupation with self-esteem. People who are anxious, uncertain and unhappy often believe that they are the victims of the actions of other people who are hurting their self-esteem. Depression, anxiety and unhappiness are serious concerns, and people with those feelings – and people with real illnesses – deserve to be supported. However Dr. Vitz feels modern therapy often just supports people in their beliefs that they are victims, and encourages them to blame other people for their feelings. Modern therapy is negative.
During his discussion of negative psychology, he touches on a topic that appears to have been central to his book Psychology as Religion. He says that ideas founded in negative psychology have become prevalent in popular culture. I think he is right, and I would go further. The ideas that bad feelings and bad actions can always be blamed on someone else, and that every person who acts badly or feels bad is the victim of bad parents and a bad society are so prevalent that it I would call the victim/recovery mentality meme, nourished by negative psychology.
Dr. Vitz finds that negative psychology mirrors popular culture in many ways. It validates and teach selfish values instead of values of altruism, personal responsibility and social justice. I agree with him again. Popular psychology – celebrates sex, toys and chocolate and it judges people occupied with moral issues to be repressed, angry, judgmental and controlling. It celebrates the feelings. It is a Romantic, anti-intellectual, anti-scientific movement.
He devotes a good part of his paper to describing therapeutic psychology’s limitations. Psychotherapy has been coming under pressure in America. Talking therapies have been superceded by medical psychiatry in the treatment of several major mental illnesses. Psychotherapy, even for prolonged periods of time, does not seem to be able to produce insights that lead to major life changes. Many therapists have incorporated meditation, spirituality and religious methods into therapy. While the methodology has been eclectic, there have been positive results. Dr. Vitz sees positive psychology as movement away from preoccupation with trauma, the self, and self-esteem, with some potential for building psychology into a “transmodern” movement that, unlike the negative psychology of hurt feelings and post-modern psychology (each patient deserves his or her own theory of life) focusses on character, virtue, and spirituality.
His support for positive psychology is ironic, for a couple of reasons. Positive psychology seems to be the latest play of the humanistic psychologists, and Dr. Vitz is a critic of humanistic psychology as such. (I linked to some information about humanistic psychology in my entry on Flow a couple of months ago). Positive psychology as taught by Seligmann has also been marketing itself as a popular, happiness oriented self-help program.
Dr. Vitz likes positive psychology better than humanistic psychology because it appears to be more accessible to people with religious beliefs, and its emphasis on character and virtue are compatible with his socially conservative world-view. He is probably wrong.

[Update. I read a review of some of the activities of Dr. Seligman and other researchers at Dr. Seligman’s Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania. The writer pointed to a study concluding that the PPC’s Penn Resilience Program:

… did appear to reduce depressive symptoms among students exposed to it, those reductions were small, statistically speaking. ‘Future PRP research should examine whether PRP’s effects on depressive symptoms lead to clinically meaningful benefits for its participants, whether the program is cost-effective, … and whether PRP is effective when delivered under real-world conditions,’ …

Jesse Singal, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 7, 2021, Positive Psychology Goes to War

The article was critical of Dr. Seligman’s marketing of positive psychology and “resilience” training as therapy for US Army veterans with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and as a component of a the Army’s ineffective Comprehensive Soldier Fitness programs of the first decades of the 21st century.]

This entry started as a book review published at Blogcritics, and has turned into an essay. The book in question was written by Francis Wheen, an English columnist and writer. It was published in England, in 2004, as How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered the World: A Short History of Modern Delusions. In the US it was titledIdiot Proof. The dust jacket described the subjects and scope of the book as “Deluded Celebrities, Irrational Power Brokers, Media Morons and the Erosion of Common Sense”.

Continue reading “Idiot Proof”

I thought this review was useful for mentioning that the word “boring” and the usage of “interesting” as “not boring” seem to have entered the language only about 250 years ago.

Continue reading “Bored”