The Good Life: Should This Man Be Smiling?

But what Seligman is talking about is not quite so simple.

There was a time about 20 years ago when a graduate student approached Professor Seligman with the idea of studying happiness. He told her, basically, that she was nuts. “Happiness is just the absence of suffering,” he said. “Happiness is just an empty, smiley phenomenon.”

Times change. For much of his life, Marty Seligman frowned on smiling. He was slogging through 50 years of what he describes as “wet weather in the soul.” People change, too, sometimes. He has developed an entire theory of happiness and has become its pied piper, selling the program to colleagues, foundations, government agencies, book buyers and web browsers. Seligman now finds happiness a full, rich and complex phenomenon — a world. And he’s willing to go there himself. He has even codified happiness, though he is practical enough to hide his technical analysis way back in the appendix of his latest book, Authentic Happiness.

In the Seligman system, there is all sort of categorizing of positive emotion, dividing feelings about the past from those about the present, further breakdowns about gratification and meaning. The Full Life, according to Seligman, consists of experiencing positive emotions about the past and future, and is divided into three categories. A nice bottle of wine, say, contributes to the pleasant life. Doing work you like and having interesting hobbies where you lose yourself promotes the engaged life. Helping a worthy cause bigger than your own self-interests makes for the meaningful life.

Some of his colleagues, Seligman admits, think he is “full of shit.” Some have criticized him for “borrowing” the ideas of the late Abraham Maslow, father of the movement called Humanistic Psychology, who believed man could achieve fulfillment — if a hierarchy of needs was met.

Others gush approval. In an American Psychological Association publication a few years ago, one psychologist predicted, “Seligman will be the Freud of the next century.” For a scientist who is not terribly insulted by being called a popularizer, Seligman shows a sophisticated, media-savvy response to being compared to Freud.

“I felt enormous pride when I saw that,” he says, sipping some pinot noir. “That kind of giant influential contribution which, for better or worse, has made such a difference to so many people is what I aspire to.” And, he adds, “It’s a quote you would kill for.”

Of course, Marty orders dessert.

As Sigmund Freud developed psychiatry, he was not exactly sanguine about the human potential for happiness. Through enough struggle fighting the dirty demons of our subconscious, he thought, we might rise above our neuroses and achieve “normal unhappiness.” Psychology, as one skeptical doctor has said, “is the racket that imitates the racket called psychiatry.”

And psychologists, Marty Seligman believes, became preoccupied with the dark side of life for practical purposes. To get funding, to attract clients, to receive insurance reimbursement, psychologists needed to concentrate on mental sickness. Not only was it easier to make a living if the glass was half empty; it helped if there was constant danger that someone might smash the glass and try to slash his wrists with the shards.

“I think we’ve got billions of dollars being spent on relieving suffering,” he says, “and I’ve paid my dues about that. I’m all for relieving suffering, but that’s not all there is.”