Toward a Positive Psychology

18. Toward a Positive Psychology LIMITED PRECONCEPTIONS All human concerns, all human institutions, and all human raise bar cultures rest on human nature. Since we know little about human nature, theories (usually incorrect ones) about human nature have served in lieu of organized and valid facts and substantiated laws. Such theories, or not, have always been at the root of the various ideologies, political and economic philosophies, and sacral beliefs which mankind lived. I am convinced. that the failure of the various value systems that have been tried in the past (power politics, war, religion, nationalism, the various economic, the rationalistic as well as the romantic philosophies, technology and engineering, mechanistic science) has been due largely to their being founded on erroneous conceptions of human nature and of society. And however paradoxical this may sound, I am afraid that a number of psychologists are also working with erroneous preconceptions and unconscious assumptions about human nature (and about society) which, because they are implicit and unconscious, can maintain and perpetuate themselves beyond the reach of testing for a considerable time to come. Meanwhile they are projected by the psychologist upon his data. In this chapter I wish to discuss one such major mistake of these psychologists, namely, their pessimistic, negative, and limited conception of the full height to which the human being can attain, 353 354 MOTIVATION AND PERSONALITY their totally inadequate conception of his level of aspiration in life, and their setting of his psychological limits at too low a level. As things stand now in psychology, the science as a whole too often pursues limited or trivial goals with limited methods and techniques and under the guidance of limited vocabulary and concepts. The science of psychology has been far more successful on the negative than on the positive side; it has revealed to us much about man’s shortcomings, his illnesses, his sins, but little about his potentialities, his virtues, his achievable aspirations, or his full psychological height. It is as if psychology had voluntarily restricted itself to only half its rightful jurisdiction, and that the darker, meaner half. This is no extrinsic, superficial attitude; it seems clear rather that it is intrinsic and at the heart of the whole culture. It seems that it is quite as easy to be Hamiltonian (rather than Jeffersonian) in psychology as it is in economics, politics, or education. In a word, I contend that psychology has not stood up to its full height and I would like to know how this pessimistic mistake came to pass, why it has not been self-correcting, and what to do about it. We must find out not only what psychology is but what it ought to be, or what it might be, if it could free itself from the stultifying effects of limited, pessimistic, and stingy preconceptions about human nature. NEGATIVE ASPECTS OF PSYCHOLOGY 1. Where does this constriction and coarctation of psychology come from? It seems to me that no ad hoc or atomistic explanation will do; we are not dealing with a surface blemish on an otherwise healthy body. This blemish is clearly systemic. It is primarily an expression of the whole culture, of its characteristic genius or eidos, even though secondary specific determinants enter in as well. Science in general and psychology in particular express the same ideology or world outlook, as e.g., orthodox religion, economics, or social structure. For instance, it is too pragmatic and TOWARD A POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY 355 functional, so much occupied with expedience and the practical, with successful results that it criticizes too little the means used to get these results. It is too much focused on technology and technological excellences, and too little oriented toward basic humanistic principles, ends, and values, being on the whole amoral or muddled as a result. It stresses too exclusively behavior and too little the inner subjective life; it is Hamiltonian rather than Jeffersonian and democratic, it is too Puritan and Calvinistic, too worried, earnest, and grim, and too little oriented toward sensuousness, sensuality, pagan pleasure, gaiety, fun, loafing, and lazing, and toward the connoisseur’s view of life; it is tense rather than relaxed, it is aesthetically and emotionally impoverished rather than rich. 2. Dynamic psychology was doomed to a negative derivation by the historical accident that psychiatry rather than experimental psychology concerned itself with the conative and emotional. It was from the study of neurotics and other sick people that we learned most of what we know about personality and motivation.1 3. This voluntary blindness of psychology involves as well the character structure of human beings in general and of the individual psychologists in our culture in particular who made it that way and who keep it that way. For full understanding of this historical development we should have to make a careful study of the sociology and psychology of knowledge, of the intrinsically inevitable opposition between the creative discoverer and his epigones, e.g., Freud and the Freudians, as well as the equally inevitable war between the discoverer and the organizers and administrators of these discoveries, between the front-line soldier and the rear-area, spit-and-polish, chair-borne cavalry. We should have to go thoroughly into the nature of science, —— 1 “There are those who despair of discovering fundamental human design through a direct consideration of the opposite data and hope to come upon it more easily by observing a sufficiently numerous and otherwise ‘fair’ sample of specimens. Can we not see that any such plan is doomed to failure by its inherent contradictions? That when we continue to add individual abnormalities, they will not cancel each other out but merely present to us a cumulative index of abnormality? And that falsely to call the cumulation of abnormality a ‘norm’ is only to bewitch and bewilder ourselves unmercifully?” (128, p. 496.) 356 MOTIVATION AND PERSONALITY its origins in human nature and human needs, and its contrasting functions, as (1) safety and order producing as seen by some, and (2) as safety and order destroying as seen by others. In other words, I conceive the coarctation of psychology to have less a psychological origin than a historical-cultural-political-economic-religious one. LOW-CEILING PSYCHOLOGY What are the factors that maintain and perpetuate this constriction of psychology and protect it from self-correction? I wish to speak of only a few of the mechanisms that make this possible, since most of them are well known, e.g., repression, selective perception, various defensive mechanisms, the tendency to freeze and stabilize every flux and every process for increased safety and security, etc. 1. The most widely used and time-honored method for blinding oneself is the semantic one. It is simple, and consists only of defining science strictly in terms of the past and what is already known. Every radically new question, every new technique is then stigmatized as unscientific. Just as the old shoes feel more comfortable than the new, just as we tend to improve our homes by adding rather than by rebuilding, so do most scientists also prefer comfort, safety, and the familiar. Human beings that they are, they find it easier to work within a well- established frame of reference, with familiar techniques, concepts, and questions. The paradoxes that result are shocking.2 —— 2 Examples: 1. A professor in psychology instructed the graduate students under his guidance to do what he called an apparatus experiment. It turned out that he divided experiments in general into those that used apparatus and those that did not, and earnest tall’ followed on the superiority of apparatus experiments. It is my belief that this ludicrous point of view is more often held than psychologists would admit. 2. A student at a major university was forbidden to do the problems that she had outlined for her dissertation on the grounds that the results might be negative and then the dissertation could not be accepted. She was willing to take her chances, but she was forbidden. 3. A graduate student asked me with some worry to help him find a TOWARD A POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY 357 2. One reason for this error has been pointed out by Kurt Lewin (172, p. 25) in a passage that demonstrates that we study what is, rather than what ought to be or what might be under ideal conditions, because of the old Aristotelian error of identifying the status quo with the ideal. For example, the norms for IQ, for weight, life expectancy, for infant maturation. Do we wish to know what our life expectancy ought to be? If we do, we look up the norms for the life expectancy of people as they actually are. The fact is, of course, that all in the original standardizing group from which the average for the ideal tables are obtained might themselves be abnormal in some nonstatistical sense. It used to be normal for 75 percent of all babies to die before the age of five. It is normal in some groups to have syphilis. What we call human nature seems ordinarily to be this kind of average of the status quo and an acceptance of it. 3. Merton’s concept (214) of the self-fulfilling prophecy can help us to understand why believing something to be so makes it more likely to come to pass. Merton points out that sometimes situations and phenomena are so unstructured that the opinion of the onlooker becomes an extremely important determinant. For instance, if it is strongly enough assumed that the Negro is fundamentally happy-go-lucky, careless, lazy, uneducable, or whatever, this strong opinion itself becomes a determinant and tends —————— bibliography for his dissertation, since he felt that if he did not have a bibliography, he could not use that subject for a dissertation.

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