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Experts on your well-being

We live in an age consumed by worship of the psyche. In a society plagued by division of race, class, and gender we are nonetheless bound together by a gospel of psychological happiness. Rich or poor, black or white, male or female, straight or gay, we share a belief that feelings are sacred and salvation lies in self-esteem, that happiness is the ultimate goal and psychological healing the means.

Eva S. Moskowitz, In Therapy We Trust

When Seligman had positive dreams

‘I have a mission’,1 declared Martin Seligman a year before running for president of the American Psychological Association (APA), the largest professional association of psychologists in the United States, with more than 117,500 members.2 Seligman was not sure what his mission was exactly, but he believed that he would find out once elected.3 He already had some things in mind, amongst them doubling research funding for mental health, further expanding the scope and reach of applied psychology to the field of prevention, and turning away from the dull, negative, disease model of clinical psychology. ‘But at bottom’, he said, ‘that’s not it.’4 He had a more ambitious goal in mind. Seligman was looking for a new psychological perspective on human nature that could rejuvenate psychology and extend its scope and influence.

Seligman’s ‘eureka’ moment came only a few months after being ‘surprisingly’ elected president of the APA in 1998. While weeding his garden with his five-year-old daughter, Nikki, he yelled at her for throwing weeds into the air and she replied: ‘Daddy, do you remember before my fifth birthday? From the time I was three to the time I was five, I was a whiner. I whined every day. On my fifth birthday, I decided I wasn’t going to whine anymore. That was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. And if I can stop whining, you can stop being such a grouch.’5 According to Seligman, ‘Nikki hit the nail right on the head’ and he suddenly ‘realized that raising Nikki was not about correcting whining’, but about amplifying her ‘marvelous strength’.6 As with parenting, he said, the problem of psychology was to focus on fixing what is wrong with people rather than nurturing what is right with them to help them develop their fullest potential. ‘This was an epiphany for me, nothing less’,7 claimed Seligman in the inaugural manifesto, ‘Positive Psychology: An Introduction’, published in American Psychologist in 2000. Seligman stated that he did not have a ‘less mystical way’ to explain the genesis of positive psychology. Indeed, offering the same epiphany narrative that religious leaders tell their followers, Seligman stated ‘I did not choose positive psychology. It called me […] Positive psychology called to me just as the burning bush called Moses.’8 Thus, as if descended from heaven, Seligman claimed to have finally found his mission: the creation of a new science of happiness to inquire about what makes life worth living and to discover the psychological keys to human flourishing.

But as is often the case with revelations, the picture of positive psychology presented in the inaugural manifesto was vague. Cherry-picking from evolutionary, psychological, neuroscientific and philosophical claims and concepts, the rubric of positive psychology was rather eclectic and poorly delineated. The manifesto resembled more a declaration of intentions than a solid scientific project. ‘Like all selections, this one is to some extent arbitrary and incomplete’, claimed the authors of the manifesto, who rushed to clarify that the special issue was intended only to ‘stimulate the reader’s appetite’ regarding the ‘offerings of the field’.9 But, what did the field really offer? For many, nothing new: old, scattered claims on self-improvement, happiness and deeply rooted American beliefs on the power of individuals for self-determination, clothed in positivist science, and whose history could be easily traced back via the adaptability psychologies and self-esteem movements of the 1980s and 1990s, the humanistic psychology of the 1950s and 1960s, and the consolidation of the self-help culture and ‘mind cure’ movements throughout the twentieth century.10

Indeed, it might be well said that, very much like the main character from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, the newborn positive psychology seemed to have come into existence quite aged. Not for its fathers, though. In Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi’s own words, the newborn field offered ‘a historical opportunity […] to create a scientific monument – a science that takes as its primary task the understanding of what makes life worth living’.11 This included positive emotions, personal meaning, optimism and, of course, happiness. In this guise, positive psychology was optimistically announced at the highest levels of academic psychology as a new scientific enterprise able to expand its results ‘to other times and places, and perhaps even to all times and places’.12 Nothing less.

The idea raised eyebrows and sparked scepticism, to say the least, but Seligman was determined to push his mission forward. While in his 1990 book Learned Optimism, the former behaviourist and cognitive psychologist said that ‘optimism may sometimes keep us from seeing reality with the necessary clarity’,13 the epiphany changed him – as he put it, ‘in that moment, I resolved to change’.14 Seligman did not want to label his proposal as behaviourist or cognitivist, or even as humanistic, but to start a brand-new scientific field that could gather as many adherents as possible. After all, the road to a more positivist orientation towards the scientific study of happiness had already been paved: although timidly, it had already begun to be outlined in psychology in the early 1990s with the works of Michael Argyle, Ed Diener, Ruut Veenhoven, Carol Ryff and Daniel Kahneman, all of whom claimed that previous attempts to understand happiness had a meagre impact, lacked theoretical consistency and credible assessment procedures, and were excessively value-laden. Thus, perhaps aware that there was something fanciful about the newborn field of positive psychology – ‘you might think that this is a pure fantasy’, the founding fathers admitted – the manifesto concluded with a rather encouraging and confident statement: ‘the time is finally right for positive psychology […] We predict that positive psychology in this new century will allow psychologists to understand and build those factors that allow individuals, communities and societies to flourish.’15

In the weeks following his election as president of the APA, cheques started ‘appearing’ on Seligman’s desk, as he put it. ‘Grey-hair, grey-suited lawyers’ from ‘anonymous foundations’ that only picked ‘winners’ called Seligman for meetings in fancy buildings in New York, wondering ‘what is this positive psychology?’ and asking him for ‘ten-minute explanations’ and ‘three-pager’ proposals: ‘a month later, a check for $1.5 million appeared’, said Seligman. ‘Positive psychology began to flourish with this funding.’16 The field, indeed, expanded to unprecedented levels in a very short time. Already in 2002 the field had amassed around $37 million in funding. It seemed to be the right time to publish the first Handbook of Positive Psychology that would declare the ‘independence of the field’. The chapter entitled ‘The Future of Positive Psychology: A Declaration of Independence’ concluded that it was time to ‘break away’ from ‘traditional psychology’ based on ‘weakness’ and a ‘pathological model’ of human behaviour. The editors claimed that the handbook ‘simply had to happen’, finishing with the remark that ‘it is our view […] that the first stage of a scientific movement – one that we would characterize as a declaration of independence from the pathology model – has been completed.’17 Thus, with the help of worldwide press coverage and media hype, positive psychologists successfully disseminated amongst academics, professionals and the lay public the idea that a new science of happiness capable of finding the psychological keys to well-being, meaning and flourishing had finally arrived.

An expensive monument

In a matter of a few short years, positive psychologists had swiftly created a broad and global institutional network, widely propagated through PhD and Master’s programmes; prizes, scholarships and specialized courses in applied positive psychology; symposiums and workshops all over the world; an increasing number of handbooks, textbooks and monographs; blogs and websites for information dissemination and data collection on life satisfaction, positive emotions and happiness through online questionnaires; and numerous academic journals exclusively devoted to carrying out research in the field, such as the Journal of Happiness Studies, founded in 2000, the Journal of Positive...