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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

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

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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)

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Seligman may not be as influential as a Donald Woods Winnicott or an Alfred Adler, but he's more than a blip. For the past three decades Seligman has been conducting research on animals and humans that has garnered broad attention from popular as well as academic circles. Best known for his work on helplessness, in which dogs subjected to electric shocks gradually lost their wills, he then went on to apply these ideas to human studies. His theoretical orientation tends toward a cognitive and behaviorist model, which focuses on learning processes and conscious thought rather than life narratives and the unconscious. In clinical practice, the cognitive/behaviorist client learns to rethink or re-experience an emotional problem and thereby solve it, often in just a few sessions. This orientation has gained more credence in the past decade, as a growing body of evidence shows that for certain afflictions, cognitive and behaviorist techniques are both more effective and cheaper than long-term therapy.

Seligman's research on depression over the last three decades has led to surprising conclusions -- ones that call into question the two most common explanations given for depression. Unlike psychopharmacologists, who treat depression -- whatever its origins -- as a biochemical imbalance, or psychotherapists, who treat it as a result of bad experiences, Seligman has posited another theory. What if "negative thinking," which most therapists would construe as a symptom of depression, is actually its root cause? Seligman also found that positive thinking, or optimism, a mind-set that he claims has been shown to make people happier and more successful, can be learned, a proposition he set forth in his popular 1991 book "Learned Optimism."

Many psychologists and psychiatrists schooled in psychodynamic therapy, in which an intimate bond between psychologist and client is central to the work, are leery of embracing the cognitive model. "I'm not a great fan of cognitive therapy, but my lack of enthusiasm is not scientific," says Peter Kramer, author of the bestselling "Listening to Prozac." "There is lots of evidence that it is effective for lots of disorders, but I have an aesthetic problem that it doesn't seem deep enough. As a doctor, that's a pretty odd thing to say, I realize. But there's something about both the biological model and the psychoanalytic model that has a kind of depth to it." Many psychologists I spoke to echoed Kramer's concerns with the limits of these theories, although almost all endorsed Seligman's call for a less pathological framework and a focus on prevention.

"I agree with him so far as prevention is concerned," says Marsha Levy Warren, author of "The Adolescent Journey: Development, Identity Formation, and Psychotherapy." She contends that prevention is already an increasing concern for many researchers and has been since the '60s. "We are learning to intervene at earlier and earlier ages in the action between caregiver and infant," she says of her work with children. "And this proves to be preventative." But after years of personal confession, dream interpretation and reassembling complex family narratives, many psychologists are loath to embrace the simple -- some might say shallow -- pragmatism of cognitive methods. "Cognitive methods work for isolated problems like panic attacks or phobias," says Debra Rosenzweig, a clinical psychologist in New York City. "But I've never had a client come to me with so specific an ailment. Long-term psychotherapy is still the best way to help people with depression and other borderline personality disorders."

Seligman's positive -- and positivist -- views are just one trajectory on a larger movement away from psychology's psychoanalytic framework. Perhaps the apogee of that swing came this year with the publication of Judith Rich Harris' "The Nurture Assumption," which attacked one of the foundations of the psychological narrative: the idea that parental behavior has a lasting effect on the adult personality. Harris, an ailing, undoctored grandmother whose controversial ideas have put her on a fast train to fame, fortune and notoriety, spoke at the APA to a packed house of grimacing faces. Her paper "Don't Blame Your Parents" set forth the thesis of her book: that the adult personality arises from two primary influences -- our genes and our peers. Even in the case of child abuse, she maintains, there's no data to prove its permanent influence on the adult personality.

An outsider to psychology who was once kicked out of graduate school, Harris has been easily dismissed. But Seligman, in his 1994 book "What You Can Change, and What You Can't," posited a very similar argument. Although he takes no stand on the issue of peer influence, he does argue that studies of separated twins and adopted children (the same literature Harris draws from) contain no evidence that childhood traumas lead to adult troubles. "If you want to blame your parents for your own adult problems," he writes, "you are entitled to blame the genes they gave you, but you are not entitled -- by any facts I know -- to blame the way they treated you." On the issue of catastrophic abuse he's somewhat more relenting than Harris. "Traumatic events, like brutal sexual abuse, exert destructive effects on later life," he writes. "But childhood trauma is not more destructive than adult trauma. If anything, children heal better than do adults."

The ebb and flow of psychological theories are as constant as the tides. But is it any accident that Seligman's call for prevention and positive thinking -- which are much quicker and cheaper than in-depth therapies -- coincides with the greatest economic crisis the discipline of psychology has ever faced? Even if many psychologists won't accept Seligman's message, it's interesting to note that most managed care companies would probably eagerly endorse it.

N E X T_ P A G E .|. Psychiatric help -- 5 cents