If you want to be happier, Gary Greenberg's captivating cover story America's War on Unhappiness - Goodbye Freud, Hello Positive Thinking for the September 2010 Harper's Magazine will not help.
Greenberg dissects American psychotherapy and his experiences at the 2010 Evolution of Psychotherapy Conference in Anaheim as only an incisive, experienced psychotherapist can:
"... when you're fresh from the Hold Me Tight: Strengthening the Bonds of Love workshop and on your way to a demonstration of Mindsight and Neural Integration, when you have to decide whether you'll learn about Imago Couples Therapy or Differentiating Between Onion and Garlic Clients before attending Deepak Chopra's keynote lecture on Reinventing the Body and Resurrecting the Soul... it's easy to think that some sort of plague is upon our land."
Greenberg goes on to describe the Dodo Bird Effect which predicts patients in psychotherapy will do better than people left to their own devices no matter what type of therapy they receive, a sort of placebo or Hawthorn effect.
He notes Martin Seligman's surprise that the CIA used his learned helplessness research shocking dogs in their enhanced interrogation torture programs and describes the father of positive psychology's frequent fracturing of historical facts in detail.
Seligman's insights about happiness and psychotherapy are even more revealing. "Even when I did good work and I got rid of almost all of [a patient's] sadness and all of her anxieties and all of her anger, I thought I got a happy person, but I never did. What I got was an empty person."
Happiness is indeed much more, and very different from just being free of psychological disease.
Positive psychology, Seligman decided, "would be the panacea."
"The monument we can build," he asserts "is well-being. We can be the agents of massive human flourishing."
Seligman now sees positive psychology as much more, and far greater than his original "science of happiness" focus. "I had thought that positive psychology is about happiness, but it is not, he says.""Positive psychology is about well-being," and "well-being on a wide scale results in a state of human flourishing," a worthy goal which he did not describe how to achieve.
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