Brief Lecture Notes for Unit 7
The positive psychology movement (PPM)
Not well covered in the text, though see chapter 13.
Sit down (if you're not already seated) and make a quick list of the five people, living or dead, you most admire or respect in the world. These don't have to be "famous" people (i.e., people whose names others would readily recognize), though if you're doing this exercise for class, it helps.
Please do the exercise before reading further. If you do not, our legal department expressly disavows all responsibility for the outcome.
The "positive psychology movement", which we will be discussing in this unit, is currently designated as a "movement" rather than a "school" because it is too new for its adherents to have coalesced their thinking about a specific theoretical framework. However, this movement has already begun transforming the psychological framework in important ways. Many "big names" in psychology (that of Martin Seligman heading the list) have signed on as proponents of this point of view.
As we'll be defining it, the positive psychology movement (PPM) has two major emphases. Let's begin with a brief look at both of them.
First, the PPM notes that, in general, the other schools of thought in psychology place (to a greater or lesser extent) a disproportionate emphasis on mental pathology (what goes wrong with the human personality) rather than mental health (what goes right). This criticism is more obvious with some schools of thought (e.g., the psychodynamic) and more subliminal and implicit (e.g., the phenomenological, which despite its claims to be a "human potential" movement, in practice often focuses as much on incongruence -- a fault or problem -- as it does on congruence.) Whether the emphasis is on repression (psychodynamic), problematic environmental contingencies (behaviorist), incongruence and inauthenticity (phenomenological), irrational beliefs (cognitive), or neurological imbalance (biomedical), the focus appears to be on the identification and elucidation of problems. (I have omitted the dispositional school since, as noted earlier, they do not say much, if anything, about personality development, being an inherently static model.) In practice, this means attempting to understand normal personality by generalizing or extrapolating from the abnormal, which, as Lewis once said, makes about as much sense as basing a history of British agriculture on the study of one sick cow.
Myers (2000), a leading proponent of the modern "positive psychology" movement, argues forcefully that psychology has been historically focused on pathology, not health. For instance, an electronic search of Psychological Abstracts, covering more than a century of published findings in the field, yielded nearly 137,000 articles about negative emotions like anger, anxiety, and depression, but only 9,500 articles about positive emotions. Depression alone was mentioned over 70,000 times in the abstracts; joy, a mere 850 times! The surprising result is that we know much more about what can go wrong (and how) with the human experience than what can go right (and how). The positive psychology movement is an attempt to redress this imbalance.
People are, if opinion surveys can be trusted, much happier than the experts predict them to be. With a surprising amount of longitudinal consistency, about 30% of Americans describe themselves as "very happy" and an additional 60% as "generally happy" or "fairly happy". More than 80% describe themselves as more happy than unhappy.
One thing is clear: optimal health means much more than the absence of pathology. It means the acquisition and utilization of attributes (such as resilience) that are in short supply.
Second, many strains of thought in the PPM are about self-transcendence, about meaning or purpose or mission, more than about personal self-fulfillment (happiness in the narrow or hedonistic sense). This suggests that happiness is a by-product: as Frankl notes, the words "happiness" and "happen" have a similar root. Happiness usually eludes us when we seek it as an end in itself. It is most likely to characterize our lives when we are seeking something other (and higher) than our own individual happiness.
One goal of the positive psychology movement is to help answer the question, "What makes people happy?" and thus "How can human happiness be facilitated?" Perhaps surprisingly, perhaps not, external circumstances are not the best determinant of happiness. For instance, wealth is a poor predictor of happiness; even the very rich are only slightly happier as a group than average Americans. Longitudinally, Americans today are no happier as a group than their counterparts in 1940. (However, as Strauss and Howe, as well as Pipher, note, they define happiness differently; those in Heroic and -- to a lesser extent -- Artistic phases are likely to define happiness in terms of what they do, those in Prophetic and -- to a lesser extent -- Nomadic phases, in terms of who they are. The balance between doing and being -- or, as Frank Sinatra once put it, "do be do be do" -- shifts in a predictable way as one moves through the generational seasons of the saeculum.)
One goal of the positive psychology movement is to help answer the question, "What makes people happy?" and thus "How can human happiness be facilitated?" Perhaps surprisingly, perhaps not, external circumstances are not the best determinant of happiness. For instance, wealth is a poor predictor of happiness; even the very rich are only slightly happier as a group than average Americans. Longitudinally, Americans today are no happier as a group than their counterparts in 1940.
Far more predictive of happiness is a sense of meaning and purpose. For instance, people who describe themselves as strongly religious are about twice as likely to describe themselves as "very happy" than those who describe themselves as nonreligious. It appears that the core element of happiness is not positive circumstances, but an outlook on life that allows one to find meaning in the midst of changing circumstances. See Module 7d below for more about the link between meaning and happiness.
Third, the PPM focuses on optimal functioning. What about those rare individuals who are healthier than the rest of us -- what are they like? What is the psychological ideal? What does optimal mental health look like? Is there a consensus among psychologists about what that is and what it means -- and is that consensus a culture-fair or culture-free one?
Take a minute to make a list of what you think a "very psychologically healthy" person would be like. (Begin by thinking of what you are like when you are at your very best, then add characteristics that you know you don't have, but wish you did.) Then compare your list to the lists below, drawn from the thinking of various proponents of what today would be called the "positive psychology movement" (went by different names in the past):
Gordon Allport: The "mature person"
Carl Rogers: The "fully functioning person"
Abraham Maslow: The "self-actualizing person"
Erich Fromm: The "productively oriented person"
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: The "autotelic person"
Lawrence Kohlberg: The "postconventional person"
A thought question: Can you translate these characteristics into Big Five terms? And if so, does that contradict the notion that all Big Five profiles are equally good or equally valuable?
What might promote the acquisition of characteristics similar to those above, if you agree that this is a "good" list?
Is the question even a meaningful one? Is there one and only one "healthy" way to be, or are there as many healthy ways to be as there are people?
Flow
Csikszentmihalyi (don't you just love that name? pronounced "chick-sent-me-high-ee") was interested, like most of the individuals mentioned in this unit, with the question, "Why are some people 'naturally' happier than the rest of us?" He used the so-called Experience Sampling Method (ESM) to have people keep detailed "slice of life" diaries to see if there was any connection between how people spent their time and how happy they were. Besides a few obvious conclusions (eating makes people happy), he found that the major problem in our culture is not too little time, but too much. (This, even though the average American's schedule looks twice as busy as that of his or her counterpart of a century ago, according to William Bridges.) People are good at keeping outwardly busy, but they aren't so good at finding meaning, purpose, and satisfaction in what they do. (The winner of the rat race, as one wit once put it, is still a rat.)
Csikszentmihalyi discovered that the happiest people are those who spend the largest proportion of their time in a state he christened flow. Analogous to what sports figures call being "in the zone", flow occurs when a person is engaged in tasks in which both skills and challenges are high: when they are being stretched almost (but not quite) beyond their capabilities, but are succeeding at it, and receiving real-time, immediate feedback to tell them that they are doing so. (Contrast this with the usual condition of the typical college student sitting in class, and it will lead you to some depressing conclusions about the state of contemporary American education.)
People who learn how to generate their own flow experiences are what Csikszentmihalyi calls autotelic individuals. Because they are more self-directed (less dependent on the exigencies of the external environment), and more able to turn mundane tasks into flow-generating ones (find something interesting even about boring duties), and more able to find motivation through the development of self-chosen goals, they are more capable of finding productive (that is, meaning-generating) ways to structure their time.
Also see here.
Logotherapy (See Reading 5)
To Frankl, the fundamental human characteristic is freedom of will. Human beings have freedom of will even when all other freedoms are gone, because they can choose what attitude to take toward their other limitations. Freedom is a reality despite limitations posed by the instincts, inherited dispositional factors, and environmental conditions; "Man's freedom is not a freedom from conditions, but rather, a freedom to take a stand regarding whatever conditions might confront him." All human endeavors are a waste of time if the premise of freedom is not accepted: "We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing... to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way." Frankl argued that the opposite (deterministic, reductionistic) point of view is inherently destructive of all we would want to call human: "The gas chambers of Auschwitz were the ultimate consequence of the theory that man is nothing but the product of heredity and environment or, as the Nazis likes to say, of 'Blood and Soil'."
What is the purpose of freedom of will? Fundamentally, it is the will to meaning: the basic striving of human beings is to find and to fulfill meaning and purpose. People reach out to encounter meanings to fulfill. This view is opposed to homeostatic models of human motivation in which people are seen as motivated entirely by the desire to eliminate or reduce tension. The will to meaning often implies a willingness to endure tension, even to seek out difficulties when they will produce or enhance meaning. Thus, the core motives are not "pushes" (drives, as with Freud), but "pulls" (freely chosen values and commitments). The goal, then, is not a tensionless existence, but the right kind of tension: "Mental health is based on a certain degree of tension... between what one is and what one should become. What man needs is not a tensionless state, but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him. Logotherapy... considers man as a being whose main concern consists in fulfilling a meaning and in actualizing values, rather than in the mere gratification and satisfaction of drives and instincts."
Logotherapy does not dictate to clients how to think about the meaning of life, though it offers some suggestions and insights about how meaning is to be found. "Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life; everyone must carry out a concrete assignment that demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated. Everyone's task is as unique as is his specific opportunity to implement it." (Here Frankl reminds me of Jung's famous phrase, "A person who weeds a garden well has saved the world in that spot.") Logotherapy does insist that meaning is indispensible and real, that it is something that is more discovered than invented, that it is external to the self, not a part of it or within the self, that it is found through self-transcendence and not self-actualization. "The more one forgets himself... the more human he is. Happiness is the side effect of living out of the self-transcendence of existence. Once one has served a cause or is involved in loving another, happiness occurs by itself." Three common routes to meaning are (a) loving another person more than one loves oneself, (b) achieving a goal that transcends the self, (c) transcending suffering.
The term logotherapy itself comes from the Greek word logos which means "word", "meaning", or "purpose" (the same Greek word that is used, incidentally, in John 1:1). Logotherapy addresses itself to the existential problem of meaninglessness (boredom, apathy, a "wasted" life, "squandered" time) and is not afraid to speak, albeit in rather generic terms, about spiritual issues and concerns (see also Unit 8). The deepest issues ("What is life all about? Why am I here?") are not meaningless questions even though the answers elude or transcend rationality (see Unit 8); "logotherapy speaks in the context of ultimate meanings or supra-meaning which surpasses the finite intellectual capacities of man; logos is deeper than logic. Spiritual issues such as man's aspiration for a meaningful existence... are taken earnestly and seriously instead of... being dealt with in merely instinctual terms". While Frankl deliberately refused to state whether he was a "religious" person or whether he believed in God, clearly his viewpoint has much more in common with traditional religious understandings than, say, reductive psychoanalysis or classical behaviorism.
In his writings, Frankl contrasted the notions of the nous and the psyche (two Greek words for the mind or self). To him, psychological needs were deterministic and instinctual, but these were subordinate to noetic or noological needs which were freely chosen and unconstrained. In plainer English, we might use the words "spirit" and "spiritual" (whether or not viewed in religious terms) to summarize what Frankl meant by the nous: the aspect of the human being that is genuinely autonomous, not a mere product of what Maslow would call deficit motives. The nous is what is uniquely human about us, the part of us that can make genuine, unconstrained choices.
Suffering is inherently linked to meaning; in fact Frankl might argue that one cannot have one without the other. Suffering is not viewed as a problem as such or as a neurotic symptom, but as part and parcel of the human condition that can lead to growth. It can be a paradoxical route to the achievement of meaning. Even a life that is not marked by evident suffering has to deal with the transitoriness, and the seeming arbitrariness, of life: we cannot have all the possibilities, we are forced to make choices, things don't always work out as we plan or wish (though often, with the wisdom of hindsight, better than we could have engineered for ourselves), we must confront our finitude. This constitutes our "response-ability", for we are forced to find (or concretize) meaning through deciding. "You are committed: you must wager" (Pascal).
Not all anxiety is neurotic; existential anxiety is an inherent part of the human condition. While neurotic anxiety is characterized by its anticipatory character (it creates what it fears), existential anxiety is not. Frankl makes much of the notion of paradoxical intentionality as a form of treatment. Since direct forced intention makes impossible what one forcibly wishes (the more an insomniac wills himself to sleep, the more awake he will become), an indirect paradoxical approach -- often involving self-detachment, de-reflection, and humor -- is required. (Frankl would agree with Roger Brown's classic statement, "Humor and faith are twins. Both allow a person to escape the tyranny of the present moment.")
Neurosis, to Frankl, need not be individual, and many of his writings treat the notion of collective (societal) neurosis. The collective neurosis of our age, Frankl believed, is the existential vacuum of nihilism, the notion that life has no inherent meaning; for more on that, also see Unit 8.
Study Guide 7
1. What is meant by the positive psychology movement? What have researchers in this area learned to date about what makes an optimally happy or optimally healthy person?
2. What is "flow"? What conditions are most likely to generate it? What consequences does it have?
3. What is autotelia? What do autotelic persons tend to be like and why?
4. What does Frankl mean by freedom of will? By the will to meaning? Why is each important?
5. What suggestions would Frankl have for someone seeking to enhance meaning in his or her life?
6. What are the essential elements of logotherapy?
7. What does the term "noetic" mean and what significance does it have?
8. What is meant by paradoxical intentionality, and what place does it have in therapy?
9. What is meant by the notion of a collective neurosis?