Lea Carpenter, on Big Think, has a nice reading of my Harper’s piece. She compared me to David Foster Wallace, which made me blush. But I’m not complaining.
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Shout-out of the dayLea Carpenter, on Big Think, has a nice reading of my Harper’s piece. She compared me to David Foster Wallace, which made me blush. But I’m not complaining. One Response to “Shout-out of the day”Leave a Reply |
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A very evocative and forceful series of comments on Martin Seligman, but essentially wrongheaded.
Seligman’s hypotheses of strength based positive psychology can be easily turned in to a potent self help formula that can produce rapid changes for the better.
One of the flaws of psychotherapeutic thought is its emphasis on the slowness and difficulty of change. This rapidly becomes a self fulfilling prophecy, and I have always thought that the process of dwelling on past problems is a clumsy way of dealing with real time issues in interpersonal interactions, and has the regrettable effect of hardwiring in circuits devoted to considering negative experiences. My own experience of mindfulness and positive psychology based treatment is that the old loops of dwelling in the unsatisfactory past rapidly become redundant as we function better in the present moment.
Greenberg rightly criticises the self interest of the drug industry in the debate on treatment of psychiatric problems, but is in danger of failing to recognise the self serving nature of some of his arguments. We all do this to some extent, but we do need to be aware of the trap our own self interest can pose.