January 2, 2010 Saturday
Edition 1;
National Edition
THE HAPPINESS PROFESSOR;
Dr Martin Seligman is the unofficial father of positive psychology, the controversial study of human happiness. Alan Franks visits him to discover how the inhabitants of a depressed Britain can achieve a happier outlook - and some seasonal strategies for marital harmony
SECTION: MAGAZINE;FEATURES; Pg. 44,45
LENGTH: 1353 words
An audience with the high priest of human happiness. Or to give him his proper title, Dr Martin Seligman, director of the University of Pennsylvania Positive Psychology Centre. Let's get straight to the point. How can people be happier than they are? "Close your eyes," he answers, quietly assertive. "Now, I want you to think of someone who, earlier in your life, did something that was very helpful to you." I do so, but it's a sad thought because the people I am thinking of are dead.
"They must be alive," he goes on, "and never have been properly thanked by you… OK, open your eyes. Your assignment is to write a 300-word testimony, with a beginning, middle and end, say how it affected you, and where you are in your life now. Then phone them in Cambridge and tell them you'd like to visit them."
I'm not sure why he says Cambridge, because I don't have any significant friends there. "Wherever it is. Tell them you want to visit them, but don't say why. Show up on the doorstep, and then read out the testimonial. A month later, people who have done that are markedly less depressed, and happier."
I don't do it and there are, as he might say, three reasons for this. First, and probably most important, I don't feel at all depressed, or feel that higher levels of happiness are necessarily my prerogative. Second, my assignment is actually to write an article about him. I'm about 300 words in, but there's a long way to go. Third, I would find the exercise awkward and potentially intrusive. I'd probably be terrified that the wrong person answered the door. Or else that, while I was made happier, the encounter might have the opposite effect on him/her.
Professor Seligman, 67, rather forestalls me here by saying that, "A normal response is for most people to weep." The visitor or the visited? "Oh, both, often." Tears of joy, relief, conciliation, and not to be mocked. The process sounds a little reminiscent of one of America's other notable postwar movements under the broad heading of self-help: that is, the 12-step programme practised by the various fellowships formed, such as Alcoholics Anonymous, to combat addictions. The professor nods very affirmatively at this, and it is clearly not the first time the resemblances have been noted. One of their key principles is, like many of Seligman's, very basic: don't just sit about bemoaning your lot. Think of some strategies for improving it and then put them into action.
He has any number of strategies. That has been the signature of a career that is highly successful both academically and commercially and that has earned him the unofficial status of father of positive psychology. Although the term is not new, having first been used by the humanistic Abraham Maslow in his 1954 book Motivation and Personality, it has only come to prominence since Seligman made it the theme of his presidency of the American Psychological Association in 1998. At the core of his argument is the idea that social science has been so obsessed with "defence and damage and saying 'No'" that it was unable to "consider what we can affirm and say 'Yes' to".
The culprit was - his phrase - "learned helplessness", in which depression and other mental illnesses result from a sense of powerlessness over our own situation. We have, he argues, a "catastrophic brain", meaning that it is looking for what is amiss. This may have worked in prehistory, but it doesn't do the trick in the modern world. In other words, our ancestors had every reason to envisage a predator round each corner, but in our vastly more affluent times, it would be more appropriate for us to harbour images of plenty.
Seligman's refrain is that we are depressed.
This particular "we" includes Britain which, he says, is one of six major nations whose wellbeing, according to "surveys of life satisfaction across time", has declined. Russia is also down, further than we are, while America and France are up slightly. One of the sources he cites for these conclusions is the World Database of Happiness, an ongoing register of research on the subjective appreciation of life, co-ordinated by Erasmus University in Rotterdam.
So what's up with us? In his answer, the "we" shifts into a short form to cover all aspects of communality. "I", meanwhile, comes to signify the appetite of the individual. These two entities, he argues, are out of balance with each other. Distress, both personal and collective, is the result of that tension. "When we fail, what is our consolation?" he asks. "Our grandparents had God, nation, community, large families. Our children, by and large, have none of these things. So one of the possibilities is that the I has got very big, while the We has declined. Depression is almost surely an illness of the I. If we think that the perception of being thwarted is a necessary condition for depression, then the question is, what kind of spiritual furniture is there to fall back on? Our children's furniture is threadbare."
Seligman, with his emphasis on positive psychology, is not without his detractors. Some, like Professor Robert Reich, who was Secretary of Labor in Clinton's first term, fear that optimism, far from being the cure for our ills, is actually one of the causes. He puts it like this: "[American] optimism carries over into our economy, which is one reason why we've always been a nation of inventors and tinkerers, of innovators and experimenters. But it also explains why we spend so much and save so little. Our willingness to go deeper into debt and keep spending is intimately related to our optimism."
Barbara Ehrenreich, a renowned feminist of the left, goes further than this in her mordant and challenging book Smile or Die; How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World. The idea for it came to her after she was diagnosed with breast cancer and found her hospital bed littered with pink ribbons and toy rabbits and other well-meant but, to her, enraging manifestations of Bright-Sideism. "For any non-academic motivational speaker," she writes, "it [positive psychology] was a godsend. No longer did they need to invoke the deity or occult notions like the law of attraction to explain the connection between positive thoughts and positive outcomes; they could fall back on that touchstone phrase of rational, secular discourse - 'Studies show…'"
I ask Seligman if he considers himself happy. He pauses to think before answering, as he often does, and says, "I'll tell you a story." And he does. Briefly, it concerns two Oxford philosophers with whom he dined 30 years ago, when they were the age he is now. He asked them when they thought they were at their best, and they both replied, "Now." As he now does.
He doesn't do new year's resolutions. He looks slightly dismissive of the idea, although he confesses he made one last year, to walk five million steps, which he did. I ask for one more "action exercise", and he says there is a good, and seasonal, one that has come out of marital therapy.
"You have active, passive, constructive and destructive options," he says. "Now, what most people do is passive constructive. Your husband or wife comes home and says they've been promoted and you go, 'Congratulations, dear, you deserve it.' You can also do active destructive and say, 'You do know what tax bracket that's going to put us into?' Or you can do passive destructive: 'What's for dinner?' The one that works the best is active constructive. For example: 'I've been reading the reports you've been writing for the company for the past few months, and that one you wrote on the pension plan is the best thing I've ever seen on pension plans. Will you relive that moment with me? Where were you when the boss told you you were promoted? Did you talk? Exactly what did he say?' So, it's a way of celebrating. It turns out that getting people to be active constructive is a much better predictor of increased commitment and love than teaching people how to fight each other."
So now you know.
'Think of someone who did something helpful to you. Write a testimonial saying how it affected you, show up on their doorstep and read it out'
