We talk of understanding psychosis, and neurosis, intellectual disability, and destructive habits. More and more popular psychology books take a sort of gleeful pride in showing how we can't be trusted to make our own decisions, or to think rationally, or even to know ourselves in any sort of meaningful way.
I am reminded, in a way, of the T. S. Eliot lines from the Waste Land;
Psychology it seems, has taken on the role of showing us that "something"; the something that is beyond the obvious. It has taken a number of forms; the rampant, destructive Id, the impossible allure of the Race Consciousness, the inescapable grip of childhood, the innate incompetence of our own neurology. We are taught that Psychology is the way we understand our own inability to understand.
This, however, is only half the story.
We have our failings, and no one would actually claim that humans were perfect in any way. The problem is that we are more than just a bundle of neurosis and irrational decision making. We are also courageous, productive, integrous, thoughtful, amazing, and ultimately we have managed to build a pretty good world around ourselves as a whole.
And yet psychology has, historically, downplayed and even written off these positive aspects of human psychology. Martin Seligman, celebrated positive psychologist, lamented these facts in his 1998 presidential address to the American Psychology Association;
Yet we have scant knowledge of what makes life worth living. For although psychology has come to understand quite a bit about how people survive and endure under conditions of adversity, we know very little about how normal people flourish under more benign conditions.
This is because since World War II, psychology has become a science largely about healing. It concentrates on repairing damage within a disease model of human functioning. Such almost exclusive attention to pathology neglects the flourishing individual and the thriving community.
In fact, that speech was seen as the genesis of Positive Psychology, a perspective rather than a school, that seeks to explore and properly understand the positive side of life.
To a lot of people this seems like a trivial point but when you think about it we are so attached to this pathological model of society as a whole that we completely ignore success or anything good in favour of the bad. Its seen as indulgent or even immoral to want to understand the positive traits exhibited by successful businessmen, artists and craftsmen when a child has trouble reading, or a person with Autism can't interact with his local authority.
I believe, however, that it's worth studying why Bill Gates, or The Koch Brothers, or Usain Bolt, or J. K. Rowling succeeded despite others having similar (or less) opportunity.
Unfortunately modern psychology teaches us to really ignore the individual as an anomaly. Consider the below graph;
Typically a psychology student would be taught to exclude the obvious peak as anomalous since the goal of statistical analysis is primarily to find a pattern or average. Such a peak represents an aberration and something not typical in the population being studied, therefore its meaningless (in a Logical Positivist sense).
To me, however, that peak is the most interesting thing on the graph. Maybe it's nothing, just a fluke, but maybe it's something else entirely. Maybe its an example of some exemplary trait or behaviour that warrants further study and understanding, if we simply scrub it out as not fitting the model have we learned anything? Worse, have we robbed ourselves of a chance to learn something truly exciting about the human condition?
So, consider this, psychology has done a remarkable job in understanding what can go wrong with a person, and we are more the wiser for the century of hard work and dedicated psychological research has engendered. However, like Seligman says, perhaps it is time to look at the positive about humanity?
Perhaps we, as a culture, could use it as a springboard to get away from this obsession with failure, poverty, illness, and general nihilistic concerns that have plagued us in this post-war century? Perhaps we can see that the best way to help people is not to heal what ails them, but to show them how they can make themselves better than before?
Just some food for thought!
