What You Can Change _. And What You Can't - Martin E. Seligman [0]
What You Can Change . . .
and What You Can’t
Martin E. P. Seligman, Ph.D., professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and a past president of the American Psychological Association, is a leading expert on motivation and emotion and an authority on learned helplessness. He is the director of the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania. His many books include Authentic Happiness and Learned Optimism. Dr. Seligman’s research has been supported by the National Institute on Mental Health, the National Institute of Aging, the National Science Foundation, the Department of Education, the MacArthur Foundation, the Templeton Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation.
ALSO BY MARTIN E. P. SELIGMAN, PH.D.
Learned Optimism
Learned Helplessness:
A Theory for the Age of Personal Control
Authentic Happiness
The Optimistic Child
To
NICOLE DANA SELIGMAN
born August 26, 1991,
at the end of a week
in which human beings changed
what for most of this century
had seemed
beyond change.
Born into a new world.
God, grant me serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.
Attributed to Friedrich Oetinger
(1702–1782), and to Reinhold Niebuhr,
“The Serenity Prayer” (1934)
CONTENTS
Preface to the Vintage Edition
PART ONE
Biological Psychiatry vs. Psychotherapy and Self-Improvement
1. What Changes? What Doesn’t Change?
2. Booters and Bootstrappers: The Age of Self-Improvement and Psychotherapy
3. Drugs, Germs, and Genes: The Age of Biological Psychiatry
PART TWO
Changing Your Emotional Life: Anxiety, Depression, and Anger
4. Everyday Anxiety
5. Catastrophic Thinking: Panic
6. Phobias
7. Obsessions
8. Depression
9. The Angry Person
10. Post-traumatic Stress
PART THREE
Changing Your Habits of Eating, Drinking, and Making Merry
11. Sex
12. Dieting: A Waist Is a Terrible Thing to Mind
13. Alcohol
PART FOUR
Growing Up—At Last
14. Shedding the Skins of Childhood
15. Depth and Change: The Theory
Acknowledgments
Notes
PREFACE TO THE VINTAGE EDITION
What You Can Change . . . and What You Can’t was my attempt to review with unflinching candor the effectiveness of most of the different kinds of treatment for the major psychological disorders. As I survey the effectiveness of these treatments thirteen years later, I am somewhat surprised to find that most of the results remain the same, and the rest are not substantially different. But a pattern has become increasingly clear, and it is important for consumers to know about it. Because of the exigencies of financing and insurance, the psychological and biological treatments of patients confront ever more restricted budgets. In response, the professions of clinical psychology and psychiatry, as well as their research arms, have come to concentrate on firefighting rather than fire prevention. They focus almost entirely on crisis management and the rendering of cosmetic symptom relief, and they have all but given up on the notion of cure.
There are two kinds of medications, and similarly, there are two kinds of psychological interventions: curative and cosmetic. With medication, if you take an antibiotic and you take it long enough, it cures by killing the bacterial invaders. That is, when you’re done taking it, the disease does not recrudesce. On the other hand, if you take quinine for malaria, you only get suppression of the symptoms. When you stop taking quinine, malaria returns. Quinine is a cosmetic drug, a palliative, and all medications can be classified either as curative in intention or cosmetic in intention. Palliation is a good thing (I’m wearing a hearing aid right now.), but it is not the highest goal of interventions. Ideally, intervention is a way station to cure.
Yet every drug in the psycho-pharmacopoeia is cosmetic. There are no curative drugs, and biological psychiatry seems to have given up on the notion of cure. I am by no means a