In its search for egregious silliness, “Bright-Sided” also unearths an academic (who has been written about by Ms. Ehrenreich before and thus goes to great lengths to dodge her), Martin E. P. Seligman, a former president of the American Psychological Association, whose book “Authentic Happiness” is tailor-made for her purposes. She finds Mr. Seligman’s ideas of cultural uplift to be laughable; he plays into her hands by suggesting that they go to an art museum and look at the Monets. Ms. Ehrenreich describes trying to take notes with a pen, being told she can’t use one in the museum and thinking privately that she dislikes Monets for their “middle-class notions of coziness,” but doesn’t “hate them enough to stab them with my felt-tip pen.”
This paragraph is taken from Janet Maslin’s review of Barbara Ehrenreich’s new book, Bright Sided. The review appeared in the October 11th issue of the New York Times.
The book, and the review of the book, should raise a number of questions for the readers of PT—and for that matter—the readers of this Blog. Here are two:
1. Is Barbara Ehrenreich’s basic thesis—namely that the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America correct?
2. Has (American) Psychology or have (American) psychologists contributed to a relentless and irrational promotion of “positive thinking” thereby undermining America?
Let’s venture a couple of answers:
“Positive Thinking” (as in The Power of Positive Thinking”) is the belief that inward, psychological acts can have a measurable effect on the material world. Further, it is the belief that having optimistic, cheery thoughts can lead to a happy, healthy, and long life. For example: “if you just believe in yourself and have a positive outlook and self-image you can be happy and successful. “ At its worst, and this is what Ehrenreich is driving at; this can be an utterly unrealistic ignoring of factors extrinsic to the self; a kind of selfishness that is both immoral and amoral. In other words, at its worst it ignores external reality and creates a fantasy world where there is regression in the service not of the Ego but of the Id (to use psychoanalytic jargon for the sake of brevity). This is the immorality or rather a-morality or the infantile pre-morality of The Id (to use psychoanalytic jargon for the sake of brevity). At its best, it is perhaps a desire to have a balanced view of things where one does not merely look at everything in the worst possible light. That there is something about current American life that is not merely just a realistic positive outlook—that there is a relentless pursuit of pleasure at any cost is hardly debatable. Whether this relentless pursuit of positive thinking is a symptom, a cause, or an effect of this is certainly debatable—and if there is an answer-it is probably that it is all three.
All this is preliminary, I suppose, to what is of interest to Us—namely that Ehrenreich takes on Big Psychology and A Big Psychologist as part and parcel of this supposed sad state of affairs. She does not pick psychology at random of course, nor The Big Psychologist--it is no doubt not merely an oversight on her part that her primary target is neither Psychiatry (and Big Psychiatry), nor recognized religions (like Christian Science) nor unregulated self-help practitioners (though she takes shots all of these). We can, as we reflect on the book (and its hardly random review in the NYT), consider what makes us either a particularly good target or a particularly inviting, or a particularly vulnerable one.
Are there psychologists (licensed psychologists—members of the APA for that matter) who practice or promote unrealistic and self-serving egoism? Does the promoting of various psychological approaches to unrealistic self-assessment contribute to this current atmosphere of me-first-ism? There can, in my opinion, be little doubt that this is so. In her book, when Psychologists promote the idea of self-help in this kind of way they undermine the heart of the social contract that makes social cooperation possible—it becomes a solipsistic, infantile, magical thinking (look on the bright side!, if you just believe in it, It will come true).
That Professor Seligman makes a convenient target is self evident. For those not of faint heart, you can click on http://www.authentichappiness.sas.upenn.edu/seligman.aspx and form your own opinion…
and Check Out a Monet!
