AUTHENTIC HAPPINESS: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment

AUTHENTIC HAPPINESS: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment. By Martin E. P. Seligman. Free Press. 321 pp. $26

It’s an irony of inspirational literature that the dour skeptics and depressives who are arguably most in need of uplift scoff at books that presume to chart the way to good cheer. But Seligman, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, aims to galvanize just that grumpy clientele with Authentic Happiness, a guide that portrays the pursuit of hope and happiness as a serious, rigorous mission rather than a frivolous illusion or mere feel-goodism.

The author of Learned Optimism (1991) brings two unusual credentials to the task. First, he is a scientist—a cognitive psychologist who has been a pioneer in bringing "hope into the laboratory... [to] dissect it in order to understand how it works." Second, he claims to be (or to have been) a "dyed-in-the-wool pessimist" who spent "50 years enduring mostly wet weather in my soul"—"a grouch," in the words of his kindergartner, who one day changed her father’s life by urging him to stop grumbling. "I was a whiner," his daughter told him, holding herself up as an example, but "on my fifth birthday, I decided I wasn’t going to whine anymore." For Seligman, it was the epiphany that launched the now four-year-old movement he calls Positive Psychology and infused his career and life with new meaning.

As the inspirational nugget about his wise child suggests, inside Seligman the downbeat realist has plainly lurked a romantic apostle eager to get out. And as the rest of his book reveals, Seligman the scientist does not always demand the greatest stringency of laboratory work, or dwell on its inevitable limitations. The many studies he cites (and the tests he invites readers to take) on such topics as optimism, gratitude, forgiveness, and "satisfaction with the past" do not generate quite the definitive data he would have you think. As he himself says, "how you feel about your life at any moment is a slippery matter," far from easy to measure. "Perhaps neither response will seem to fit," he prefaces his optimism assessment; "go ahead anyway and circle either A or B."

Yet to say that the Positive Psychology project is driven perhaps as much by motivational fervor as by methodological rigor is not to suggest that it’s for softies. Seligman’s appeal is to those who pride themselves more on having heads on their shoulders than on getting in touch with their feelings. He has cobbled together interesting research done over the past 30 years, since the cognitive revolution in psychology and the advent of behavioral genetics. The research challenges both the fatalistic and the facile assumptions promoted in a Freudian era that found victims everywhere in need of cathartic release from anger and guilt repressed since childhood. Seligman’s "new" psychology sounds decidedly more old-fashioned.

We are prisoners of our childhoods, he argues, only in the sense that "bubbliness (called positive affectivity)" is a "highly heritable trait." Otherwise, our fate is in our hands—or rather in our heads and our characters. By learning to argue rationally and accurately against the "negative" emotions with which evolution has amply armed us, and even better, by building on the "strengths and virtues" we recognize in ourselves (cross-cultural research has inspired a list of 24 to choose from), we can become more buoyant and resilient. Not least, we can discover true gratification, which brings a sense of selfless fulfillment.

A grouch might complain that when Seligman turns to apply his principles to work, love, and parenting in his closing chapters, he suddenly changes his mind about the secondary importance of childhood events. He joins countless experts in saying that a "securely attached" start in life—and lots of empathetic communication ever after—helps create more purposeful workers, loyal spouses, and competent, confident, committed children. Then again, if Seligman had prescribed a flashy, original formula for the age-old pursuit of the good life, wouldn’t you be skeptical?

—Ann Hulbert