The Good Life: Should This Man Be Smiling?

In some ways, the notion of a positive psychology goes back long before Freud, to the days when philosophers actually thought about how to lead a good life. In other ways, Seligman’s movement seems yet another mutation of the American self-help movement: Power of Positive Thinking with a Ph.D. He’s heard the criticism. “Unlike the South Beach Diet,” he insists, “this will be something that actually works.”

How Positive Psychology works is still being developed. Whether it will work, of course, is yet unproved. Seligman maintains that early experiments are encouraging. For instance, people who wrote and delivered a letter of gratitude to someone who’d helped them in life (parent, teacher, friend) felt substantially better for as many as three months, but then the effects mostly wore off. Another group of subjects simply made a nightly list of three good things that happened in their day and why they happened, and increased their sense of well-being (though not as much as the gratitude folks) for as long as six months.

Seligman, who is wise to the politics of academia and government funding, has rounded up a posse of like-minded and respected professors and formed the Positive Psychology Network, which includes, among other notables, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, famous for naming and analyzing Flow, the state of total engagement. Like any good academic entrepreneur, Seligman has set up an infrastructure of research centers, foundation grants (almost $30 million has come in so far, more than he’d been able to raise in his previous 40 years), conferences and graduate programs. “Seldom,” said Time magazine, “has an academic field been brought so quickly and deliberately to life.”

Young Martin Seligman got into the psychology racket in the mid-’60s after earning a philosophy degree from Princeton. “There were three things I seriously considered doing,” he remembers. “One was becoming a professional philosopher. The second was becoming a professional bridge player. The third option was what I did. I think my talents lay in psychology.”

He came to Penn for a Ph.D. and began the work of driving dogs crazy. Along with two other graduate students, Seligman discovered that canines who couldn’t control the shocks they were given finally gave up. The phenomenon was called “learned helplessness,” and it contradicted what was then accepted … uh, dogma in experimental psychology.

Seligman had found a research area that might have satisfied him for his entire career. “I was doing good analytic science,” he says. Then one day he had lunch at Kelly and Cohen’s with his senior colleague Aaron Beck. Beck was doing good practical science — remarkable, paradigm-busting work, actually — as a pioneer in the field that became known as cognitive therapy.

Seligman vividly remembers that lunch. Beck told him, “You’re wasting your life.”

“This was when I was doing the learned-helplessness thing. Beck said, ‘Your life’s only going to be meaningful if you transform this stuff into working on important problems.’ That hurt, but he was right.”