The Good Life: Should This Man Be Smiling?

Seligman paid closer attention to the nagging variables in his experiments. In fact, a fair number of dogs (and people) in the learned-helplessness experiments never gave up. He’d seen similar results when observing salesmen do the equivalent of receiving uncontrollable negative shocks — making cold calls. Maybe, he thought, the focus should shift to the resilient group.

So Seligman flipped the integers in the equation, and the eventual result was his first book for a general audience and his first best-seller: Learned Optimism. After a series of academic tomes he’d written with glum titles like Helplessness and Abnormal Psychology, this was a sunflower. And it was prescriptive: first, diagnosing that a lot of depression was a symptom of pessimistic, bad thinking, and then recommending a battery of therapeutic thought techniques drawn from Beck’s cognitive psychology, essentially trying to teach the qualities that good salesmen (and, perhaps, resilient dogs) seemed to have naturally. Fifteen years after it was first published, the book still sells 25,000 copies a year, Seligman says.

By the mid-’90s, Seligman was increasingly interested in the role of genetics in psychology and how much any therapy or drug could actually help someone. That research became What You Can Change and What You Can’t. Seligman concluded that according to the best scientific measures, change was virtually impossible for some things (like sexual identity), just moderately possible for others (like excessive drinking, weight problems and depression), and a good bet only for a few problems like panic attacks and certain phobias. Something like $30 billion had been spent on psychological research and treatment since World War II, and if icky spiders made you crazy, you were in luck.

In the final paragraph of that book, Seligman quoted one of the great self-help bromides, the “Serenity Prayer,” with its famous tripartite thought on change: courage to change what you can, serenity to accept what you can’t, wisdom to know the difference. By then, he was kind of sick of sick people.

“So much of human progress depends not on the things we do for suffering, but the things we do to shoot an arrow beyond ourselves,” he says. A few years later, when Seligman serenely won the presidency of the American Psychological Association, he found the courage to try to change psychology.

“I’m a pessimist. I’m a depressive. I take my own medicine.”

I don’t think Seligman means the banana cream tart he’s lustily finishing. There is a thread of autobiography through all his books since Learned Optimism, and the pattern that emerges portrays a man who is not very happy at all.