What You Can Change _. And What You Can't - Martin E. Seligman [116]
The appeal of the child-rearing explanations has a theoretical dimension and a moral dimension. Freud assumed both that childhood events create adult personality and that their consequences can be undone by reliving—with great feeling—the original trauma. Sound familiar? It should, because the premises are just the same as those of the inner-child movement. Freud’s premises may have undergone a steady decline in currency within academia for many years, but Hollywood, the talk shows, many therapists, and the general public still love them. The recovery movement marries Freud’s basic premises to the confessional method of AA. The result is the most popular self-help movement of the 1990s.
Childhood trauma and catharsis do make good theater. But the appeal of the inner-child movement goes much deeper, for there is here a sympathetic moral and political message as well. Its appeal has its modern beginning with the defeat of the Nazis. The Nazis used the respectable science of genetics to bolster their theory of Aryan superiority. Genetically “inferior” people—Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, the retarded and deformed—were deemed subhuman and were sent to the death camps. In the wake of our victory over the Nazis, anything they used or misused was tainted. Nietzsche’s philosophy, Wagner’s operas, and authoritarianism all became suspect. American psychology, already environmental, now shunned genetics completely and became wedded to explanations of childhood personality and the dogma of human plasticity.
When stoked by this reaction to Nazism, the logic of the dogma of human plasticity is: Once we allow the explanation that Sam does better than Tom because Sam is genetically smarter, we start our slide down the slippery slope to genocide. After World War II, genetic explanations became explanations of last resort, for they had the fetid odor of fascism and racism about them. All this accorded well with our basic democratic ideal that all men are created equal.
The second aspect of the moral appeal of the inner-child movement is consolation. Life is full of setbacks. People we love reject us. We don’t get the jobs we want. We get bad grades. Our children don’t need us anymore. We drink too much. We have no money. We are mediocre. We lose. We get sick. When we fail, we look for consolation, one form of which is to see the setback as something other than failure—to interpret it in a way that does not hurt as much as failure hurts. Being a victim, blaming someone else, or even blaming the system is a powerful and increasingly widespread form of consolation. It softens many of life’s blows.
Such shifts of blame have a glorious past. Alcoholics Anonymous made the lives of millions of alcoholics more bearable by giving them the dignity of a “disease” to replace the ignominy of “failure,” “immorality,” or “evil.” Even more important was the civil rights movement. From the Civil War to the early 1950s, black people in America did badly—by every statistic. How did this get explained? “Stupid,” “lazy,” and “immoral” were the words shouted by demagogues or whispered by the white gentry. Nineteen fifty-four marks the year when these explanations began to lose their power. In Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court held that racial segregation in schools was illegal. People began to explain black failure as “inadequate education,” “discrimination,” and “unequal opportunity.”
These new explanations are literally uplifting. In technical terms, the old explanations—stupidity and laziness—are personal, permanent, and pervasive. They lower self-esteem; they