By: Cecilia Capuzzi Simon, Special to The Washington Post
Thursday, January 02, 2003


Excerpt from the December 24, 2002 Washington Post article:

Martin Seligman Thinks Psychologists Should Help People Be Happy. Who Could Possibly Have a Problem With That?

Martin Seligman seems an unlikely man to lead the field of psychology, much less the rest of humanity, into the realm of human joy. The 60-year-old former president of the American Psychological Association and author of the bestselling "Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment" doesn't seem particularly, well . . . happy. He doesn't smile or laugh a lot; he's not especially warm or gregarious; his dress is subdued and professorial. Even his manner of speaking is quiet, monotone, often stern and blunt. But that, he says, is just the point.

Seligman is a "born pessimist," he says, but that doesn't mean he is not happy. When it comes to this vital emotion, Americans have it "dead wrong."

"You bought into Hollywood and Goldie Hawn and Debbie Reynolds, and you think the only form of happiness is pleasure," he says, seated in a large, richly furnished conference room at the Gallup Organization's headquarters on F Street NW, where he hosted the First International Positive Psychology Summit in October. Americans, he says, generally pursue a media creation of happiness that is all about superficial trappings and transient pleasures. These may make us feel good temporarily, but they don't lead to true "gratification" -- the kind of happiness Thomas Jefferson or Aristotle wrote about and the sort Seligman believes we can all pursue. In reality, he says, many of us are just "fidgeting until we die."

The antidote, says Seligman, is Positive Psychology, his effort to create a science of higher happiness and a program to help people achieve it. Positive Psychology corrects a long-standing imbalance in the profession, he says....

The Sunnier Side

Seligman's idea to shift psychology's focus made many others happy, too. Given his stature and platform, he was able to gather some of the best minds in the field, including Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a professor at California's Claremont Graduate University who coined the term "flow" and authored a book on the subject with the same title; Ed Diener of the University of Illinois, who has spent 20 years studying subjective well-being (his term for happiness); Christopher Peterson, an expert on hope and optimism at the University of Michigan; and Rick Snyder. Seligman whisked them off to Akumel, Mexico, a cheerful spot in the Yucatan (the trip has been an annual event for the last four years), and there they developed a charter for the Positive Psychology movement....