The Hope Circuit
A Psychologist's Journey from Helplessness to Optimism
1 of 1 copy available
When Martin E. P. Seligman first encountered psychology in the 1960s, the field was devoted to eliminating misery: it was the science of how past trauma creates present symptoms. Today, thanks in large part to Seligman's Positive Psychology movement, it is ever more focused not on what cripples life, but on what makes life worth living — with profound consequences for our mental health.
In this wise and eloquent memoir, spanning the most transformative years in the history of modern psychology, Seligman recounts how he learned to study optimism — including a life-changing conversation with his five-year-old daughter. He tells the human stories behind some of his major findings, like CAVE, an analytical tool that predicts election outcomes (with shocking accuracy) based on the language used in campaign speeches, the international spread of Positive Education, the launch of the US Army's huge resilience program, and the canonical studies that birthed the theory of learned helplessness — which he now reveals was incorrect. And he writes at length for the first time about his own battles with depression at a young age.
In The Hope Circuit, Seligman makes a compelling and deeply personal case for the importance of virtues like hope, gratitude, and wisdom for our mental health. You will walk away from this book not just educated but deeply enriched.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
April 3, 2018 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9781549168352
- File size: 397081 KB
- Duration: 13:47:15
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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February 1, 2018
A noted psychologist charts a long and not always happy life spent in service to positivity.Seligman (Psychology/Univ. of Pennsylvania; Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-Being, 2011, etc.) opens this memoir on a modest note of conflict: the year is 1996, and he has just won, by a large margin, the presidency of his professional guild, the American Psychological Association. The establishment didn't want him and refused to seat him in a council meeting, and he was ticked off enough that his young daughter suggested that he should "stop being such a grouch." It was an apposite idea, one that fit well with some of the work that Seligman had conducted on the path to developing a "positive psychology"--i.e., as the philosopher Robert Nozick put it, an emphasis on "the traits that are the springboards of positive experience," the creativity, discipline, and good humor that keep people well-adjusted and happy in the world. Given that psychology has traditionally concentrated on solving the problems of aberrant behavior and thinking, the idea of an evidence-based positive psychology was not met with universal acclamation--and neither, as Seligman writes candidly, was his involvement with the military and intelligence communities and the corporate world, a latter example being an attitudinal inventory to predict the success of insurance salespeople ("among the regular force, the optimists outsold the pessimists"). The purely memoir-ish aspects of the book ("by age twelve, I was brainy. Teachers liked me") are the least compelling, but the brass-tacks account of how positive psychology came into being, and Seligman's openness in discussing some of its problems, is a rewarding read for those who incline to his view that "getting what is good in life entails a lot more than just eliminating what is bad."Mildly controversial at points, mildly dismissive of such things as "the overselling of neuroscience" at others, but altogether of interest to students of the mind.COPYRIGHT(2018) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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