Wednesday, October 31, 2018
Monday, October 29, 2018
Review of "The Hope Circuit," by Martin E.P. Seligman, Ph.D.
Random Thoughts and Observations
By Steven J. Cersenie, Ph.D.
Virtue
A most important virtue is tolerance based
on humility. Tolerance is welcoming discussions with people who fundamentally
disagree with us based on humility - a recognition we cannot be sure we are
right about our beliefs.
Chance
We underestimate the importance of chance,
accident, and luck in the events of our lives. Sure, hard work and character
are important in achieving success, but reflecting on our lives highlights
whatever success we achieve in relationships and work has much to do from more
than just a little bit of luck.
Make Waves
Heard from a client who owns a sailboat
about his friend's behavior:
My friend is always making waves in a no wake zone.
Heard from a talented handyman
I'm having such a bad day, I can't even do wrong right.
Martin Elias Peter Seligman, Ph.D.
Martin E. P Seligman. The Hope Circuit. A Psychologist's
Journey from Helplessness to Optimism. New York: The Hachette Book Group,
2018.
Seligman begins his story about his journey
from helplessness to optimism by describing the world as he found it when he
arrived "one gestation period after Pearl Harbor." Both his parents
had troubled lives - far from the optimism Seligman would later research and
apply to the lives of many. His mother was born in Hungary, now Romania - his
grandmother died giving birth to his mother Irene. Irene became the center of
his father's love and attention until his father remarried and turned all his
attention from his daughter Irene to his new wife. Seligman's mother, Irene,
always felt the horrible sting of rejection. His father's parents had
emigrated from the Dutch border of Germany and from Alsace, and married in
New York in 1899. Seligman's father was an anxious child who skipped four
grades in school.
Seligman describes his father as "a brilliant
young lawyer, armed with a doctorate from Columbia Law School." It was
the second year of the Great Depression; lawyers were making a living, but
many were poor. His father chose a secure path taking a job in civil service,
reporting judges' decisions at the Court of Appeals in Albany, New York.
Seligman describes his mother as, "gorgeous - there is no other word:
five-foot-one, full-figured, blonde, and blue-eyed. She was well-spoken but
reserved and very sympathetic of manner..." Her parents' poverty took a
toll on her, and she dropped out of high school to help support the family as
a legal secretary.
In Albany, Seligman's parents joined a conservative
synagogue. To Seligman's dismay, he later learned his father was an atheist -
although his mother was very strongly attached to Judaism.
Seligman was named for his saintly maternal
grandfather who died of a sudden heart attack in 1940. Elias was chosen as
his middle name to honor his grandfather and his six-year-old sister was
given naming rights to call him Peter. So he was named Martin Elias Peter
Seligman.
There is much more detail in his elegantly
written book about his family background and his early years. A detail that
caught my eye was about Seligman, who like one of my younger entrepreneurial
brothers, took a job in his early teens selling magazines for five summers.
He made more money selling magazines than he made until he was an associate
professor.
Jumping ahead to his college years, Seligman
was strongly influenced by Robert Nozick (1938 - 2002), a professor of
philosophy at Princeton, where Seligman did his undergraduate study. Nozick
was famous for his 1974 magnum opus, Anarchy, State and Utopia. In
this classic text, Nozick wrote that he believed in capitalist acts between
consenting adults - an unusual belief for a college professor during those
years. Seligman wasn't sure whether to pursue psychology or philosophy.
Looking back, Seligman asked the question, "How much rigor? How much
reality?" These questions formed Seligman's role in the transformation
of psychology over the next fifty years.
Seligman spent his 50-year psychology career
rejecting psychology's basic premises. When he came to psychology, he found
help for psychological maladies focused on people's misery and suffering,
with Freud and his followers developing treatments hoping to remove the
crippling conflicts and memories stemming from childhood experiences. The
best humans could accomplish according to this approach was to turn
hysterical misery into common unhappiness.
Early in his career, Seligman discovered
learned helplessness, where animals and people were exposed to uncontrollable
events such as shock or noise and then developing passivity and learning to
give up. Over many years, learned helplessness has become a model for
studying and treating depression. Seligman noted that when studying learned
helplessness, about three of either people couldn't be made helpless, that
is, these three people were invulnerable to being helpless. Thus, began his
study of the components of optimism and he took techniques from cognitive
therapy to teach pessimistic people to be optimistic. I particularly liked
the chapter where Seligman discovers he was wrong about the causes of learned
helplessness based on new research on the neurological underpinnings of The
Hope Circuit. This chapter is worth the price of the book.
In 1998, Seligman was elected President of
the American Psychological Association with the largest number of votes of
any APA President. During his Presidency of APA and beyond, Seligman created
Positive Psychology, a view that there is a lot more to life than suffering, and
built his research efforts on what makes life worth living. The alleviation
of suffering is only the start to what psychologists can do for their clients
- human happiness matters. Positive psychology is now a worldwide movement to
enhance well-being and attracting some of the best psychologists in the field
who have turned their research interests to what makes people live better
lives. Seligman and his colleagues have taken his studies of positive
psychology, resilience, post-traumatic growth, optimism and more and applied
these mind-enriching concepts to people around the world in schools,
corporations, and our service people in the United States Army.
During his career, Seligman challenged the
belief that we are creatures whose minds are blank slates, where experience
is all important and writes what we take in from our senses to stamp-in
experiences on these blank slates- a core tenet of early behaviorism - a
theory that didn't take conscious experience seriously; nor did this approach
incorporate the findings of evolution seriously.
The blank slate view of humans is personal for me.
I remember the first time I evaluated an autistic child while working at a
child psychiatric state hospital in the 1970's. I met two warm, loving,
guilt-ridden parents telling me through their tears about their unresponsive,
odd five-year-old child who didn't talk and was obsessed with playing with
door knobs and hinges. When this child entered my office, he walked past me
as if I wasn't there, and went straight to the curtains and began sucking on
the cloth. Back then, the prevailing theory was autism was caused by the
child being raised by a cold "refrigerator mother," a theory I
never believed, but an accepted view in the field that caused the suffering
of thousands of children and their families. Scientists have now discovered
the importance of genetics in autism - and in all psychiatric disorders and
personality traits.
Seligman not only challenged the belief that
the best outcome humans could achieve from psychological therapy was normal
misery, but he argued against the blank slate view of humans, and stressed
the importance of evolution in human development. With his colleagues, he
showed that not any stimulus paired with any other stimulus would be learned
- a challenge to Pavlovian conditioning. Humans, it turns out, are prepared
to learn some things and not others.
During his work on Positive Psychology,
incorporating his challenges to psychology's basic premises, Seligman
compiled research evidence and became convinced there are five elements of
well-being, summarized by the acronym: PERMA.
Positive emotion
Engagement
Relationship
Meaning
Accomplishment
On a side note, it was the program committee
of the Michigan Psychological Association who invited Seligman to speak at an
MPA conference in 1996, two years before he was elected APA President.
Seligman, to the surprise of the committee, agreed to speak at the MPA
conference to announce his decision to run for APA President. I had the
privilege of picking Seligman up at the airport, and the next evening have a
gathering of MPA members at my house to meet Dr. Seligman, who I now called
Marty.
Before taking Marty to his hotel, I took
Marty to my local delicatessen for dinner. Back then, Marty was a serious
fellow, and we were soon embroiled in a discussion on the topic of sexuality.
I had worked in a child psychiatric hospital for many years and treated many
adolescent males brought in for inpatient treatment because of a history of
sexual perversions - a label not used now. As we waited for our dinner in the
crowded deli, Marty shared some of his experiences treating this sample of
youngsters and stressed the importance of classical and operant conditioning
models of etiology and the benefits of cognitive therapy. I had found the
work of psychoanalyst Robert Stoller, M.D. most helpful in treating these
trouble youngsters. Stoller had written the book, "Perversion: The
Erotic Form of Hatred," emphasizing the role of unconscious learning.
The part of our dinner I will never forget is this: Marty said in so many
words that my views were not up with the current research and then he gently
raised his voice and said, "Let's take masturbation for an
example." I noticed several restaurant patrons turn their heads our way,
and then I said to Marty, "Maybe we should discuss masturbation another
time. You're leaving town tomorrow, and I'm a regular customer at this
deli."
We both smiled.
(To comment on this column, contact Steve Ceresnie
at sceresnie@aol.com
|
Satire: Early Career Psychologist: Myth or Malady
NOTES OF A
PSYCHOLOGY WATCHER
An Early Career Psychologist: Myth or
Malady?
Steven J. Ceresnie, Ph.D.
Approaching three score and ten years, I
have had the privilege of being invited into the private lives of many people
in deep distress - that's what clinical psychologists do. But lately, I feel my
mind and body are changing - my muscles are becoming more supple, my waistline
is shrinking, my pectoral muscles are taking the shape of a younger man, and I
stop at clothing stores to sample clothing worn by college students and young
men. I have started listening to music that matches the tastes of younger, more
macho males - I find pleasure in rap, heavy metal and alternative music genres.
On some nights, late in the evenings, I go
up in our finished attic and try on these fashionable attire of young men and
adjust my Spotify to play the latest rap tunes. There are other symptoms I
experience but I'm embarrassed to make these public. I dare not tell my wife, I
fear she would suggest I seek psychiatric help.
Yet psychiatric help, of which I'm most familiar,
is not what I believe I need. Of course, I'm aware that at my chronological age
any number of biological or psychological maladies may explain my unusual
behaviors, not to mention denial of mental and physical deterioration, dementia
or death.
Over the years, I have not been prone to denial,
the most logical explanation for my behavior, and my physical health is good -
although I do take blood pressure and cholesterol medications, not uncommon for
gentleman my age.
Oh, I forgot to mention that I started reading
many psychology articles and textbooks - I keep up with the literature and
don't miss an opportunity to cruise the shelves of psychology texts in college
book stores I visit across the country seeking out the current requirements for
a Ph.D. in psychology. Not only do I read as much as I can, but I tell my wife
that my about the cravings to collect these journals and textbooks - to my wife
it appears I'm studying for exams. All of this reading can be traced to the
many seminars I'm asked to present around the country; okay, that's not exactly
the truth.
After much consideration, I fear I have a yet
undiscovered serious psychiatric disorder that in some way mimics those few men
I see in my practice who tell me they feel they have a female genotype - a
concept I use metaphorically - trapped inside their male phenotype. These men
are convinced they are females and that the world has played a cruel trick on
them. In fact, their fear of not living as females is stronger than their fear
of death; some grand existential dilemma.
Bear with me as I briefly outline what I have
come to think is my existential crises: I am an early career psychologist
trapped inside an almost 70-year-old body. After all my years of immersing
myself in the lives of others, I'm aware how easily our minds adopt beliefs,
opinions, and facts used to justify our actions. As that astute philosopher
David Hume reminds us, the intellect is a slave to our passions.
So as a scientist, skeptic and a life-long
worshipper of reason, I set out to test my passion-driven beliefs examined
under the light of intensive psychotherapy, peering into my unconscious,
preconscious, conscious, defenses and neurotransmitters. To do this, I took a
sabbatical from my work and committed myself to challenging my beliefs, or at least
attempting to understand them, by subjecting myself to the psychotherapy by the
best clinicians I could find who practiced psychoanalysis, cognitive behavioral
therapy, pharmacotherapy, and various other approaches. I took carefully
monitored trials of antidepressant and antipsychotic medications.
I am embarrassed but not surprised to report
the early career psychologist continues to live and grow inside of me despite
excellent psychotherapy and pharmacotherapy. Of course, I have not revealed my preoccupation
to my wife or any of my friends or colleagues. In the old days - during my
training as a psychologist- my behaviors were called a perversion.
So, I confine my early career psychologist behaviors
in my attic in my home - three late evenings a week for two hours after my wife
goes to sleep. I've given on being cured. Over my own years of practice, I have
learned that the word "cure" is not often applied to psychiatric
maladies. Consequently, I have come to accept the advice of Sigmund Freud:
A man
should not strive to eliminate his complexes, but to get into accord with them;
they are legitimately what directs his conduct in the world.
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