A L S O_ T O D A Y

Comics
Keith Knight: Hot for teacher

Take your thinking elsewhere!
By Camille Paglia
While academia disembowels itself with theory's blunt knives, young scholars must still pursue intellectual livelihoods outside the ivory tower

T A B L E_ T A L K

What's good about community colleges? Discuss the differences between two- and four-year institutions in the Education area of Table Talk

R E C E N T L Y

Thursdays at the Clambucket
By George Paul Csicsery
Thirty-one years after he was beaten by police in a notorious anti-war protest, a former campus radical goes back to meet his enemies and learn their side of the story
(10/19/98)

Survival of the earliest
By Lori Gottlieb
Competing for grades is one thing. But facing off for parking spaces means all-out war
(10/16/98)

Geometry and hot pix
By Chris Colin
Returning home from college, a young man is caught between his troubled younger brother and X-rated Web sites
(10/14/98)

Financial roulette with Sallie Mae
By Kristina Blachere
Make no mistake, the corporate mistress of student loans will get you in the end, but in the meantime you can play her at her own game and sometimes win
(10/12/98)

Creeps on campus
By Dawn MacKeen
Do bad guys have a right to higher education?
(10/09/98)

BROWSE THE
IVORY TOWER
ARCHIVE

S A L O N
E M P O R I U M
FREE! 12-ounce bag of Salon Blend with a purchase of $30 or more. While supplies last.

Is the new optimistic movement in psychology a theoretical breakthrough or a professional survival tactic?

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

BY CAROL LLOYD | A few years ago I went shopping for a therapist. I visited several psychoanalysts, a psychologist with a second Ph.D. in sociology and a highly recommended woman with an MFCC. I explained to each of them that though I had few big problems, I wanted to become more courageous.

"What makes you think you're not courageous?" they invariably asked. "Did someone tell you that?" Sooner or later they had me talking about all those past experiences that taught me to perceive myself as cowardly. I was trying to build a new positive character trait; they insisted on pathologizing this endeavor as a sign of low self-esteem. Eventually I abandoned my search and started taking hip-hop dance classes instead.

But if Martin E.P. Seligman has his way, therapy might yet become a discipline aimed at helping people become braver, stronger or happier. Seligman has recently called for the beginning of a movement he's dubbed "positive psychology" -- a humanistic, optimistic theory that challenges some of orthodox psychology's deepest assumptions about how the mind works and how we ought to heal it. When Seligman, author of "The Optimistic Child" and "What You Can Change and What You Can't," took over as president of the American Psychological Association in 1998, he immediately began a campaign to change the face of that pathology-hungry discipline. He discussed his vision in an article in the New York Times; he spoke at conferences; he even invited 25 graduate students to a week-long retreat in Mexico (planned for January 1999) to groom new leaders of the movement. Declaring the theme for the American Psychological Association's annual conference this August in San Francisco to be "Prevention: Promoting Strength, Resilience, and Health in Young People," he professed his hopes that psychologists could finally focus on learning how to prevent the illnesses they have spent the last 50 years attempting to cure.

Freud never imagined making people happy to be part of the therapist's job description. The point of psychoanalysis, he once wrote, was to transform neurosis into "ordinary unhappiness." He acknowledged the centrality of the desire -- in "Civilization and Its Discontents" he noted that most people "strive for happiness; they want to become happy and to remain so" -- but simply denied that it was realistic. "One feels inclined to say that the intention that man should be 'happy' is not included in the plan of 'Creation.'" Methodically dissecting different sorts of pleasure to expose their weaknesses, he drew a bleak picture: Sex is ephemeral, beauty but "mildly intoxicating," romantic love makes the subject especially vulnerable to suffering and the inner peace achieved through yoga is merely the "happiness of quietness" induced through a form of "coanesthesia." In two concise sentences, he summed up our sorry fates. "Unhappiness is much less difficult to experience. We are threatened with suffering from three directions: from our own body, which is doomed to decay and dissolution ... from the external world, which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless forces of destruction; and finally from our relations with other men."

Freud's emotionally pessimistic, intellectually vibrant worldview has lived on in psychology's adoption of the medical model -- a model he both embraced as a source of scientific authority and ignored when it hampered his creative verve. Now, however, that model has come under increasing attack -- and Seligman is one of its most articulate opponents. Speaking to a packed house at the APA conference, Seligman critiqued psychology's increasing reliance on this essentially negative approach, arguing that since World War II psychology had narrowed from being a discipline that cured mental illness, improved people's lives and nurtured their talents to one dedicated almost exclusively to pathologies. Calling for a psychotherapeutic practice focused on "nurturing what is best within our selves," he explained the motivation for this paradigm shift in grand historical terms. On the one hand, he said, our nation is experiencing a period of unprecedented peace and prosperity; on the other, studies show that individually we've never been so depressed. It was high time that psychology learned to nip the spread of mental illness in the bud, he contended, rather than continue to try to chop down one forest of misery after another.

Although learning to be optimistic may seem like a bold new idea in research psychology, America has been swimming in such notions ever since Norman Vincent Peale wrote "The Power of Positive Thinking," which gave birth to the current self-help movement. Now Seligman is breathing scientific life into Peale's shopworn Christian message.

Just how influential his ideas are is hard to say. His cognitive, get-in-and-fix-it approach certainly has its backers: Even at an APA panel on "Terror Management Theory" -- a classically morbid field of study -- a wild-haired man named Tom Pyszczynski from the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs suggested that terror management could benefit from drawing from more positive, humanistic theories. But most of the psychologists I interviewed, even at the conference, had only the vaguest awareness of Seligman's ideas. "Therapy all comes down to individual practitioners," a psychologist friend said after I told her about Seligman's theories. "Each one of us must create our own theory. I'm busy reading the tomes from 100 years ago, I don't have time to follow every blip on the scene."

N E X T_ P A G E .|. Can you learn to be happy?