What You Can Change _. And What You Can't - Martin E. Seligman [16]
Advocating self-improvement would have made no sense before the rise of the Maximal Self. A society that views tornadoes as God’s will does not build tornado shelters. Even if it does, people will not go into them or even listen to the radio for tornado warnings. A society that views drinking as stemming from a bad and immutable character will not try to get alcoholics to refrain from drinking. A society that views depression as stemming from bad genes or unfortunate brain chemistry will not attempt to have depressives change what they think when they encounter failure. Notions of therapy, rehabilitation, and self-improvement do not arise in a society of Minimal Selves, which would not be much interested in psychology in the first place. Believing the dogma of human implasticity, the Minimal Self does not act to change itself.
But when a society exalts the self, as ours does, the self, its thoughts, and their consequences become objects of careful science, of therapy and of improvement. This improving self is not a chimera. Self-improvement and therapy often work well, and it is a belief in human plasticity that underlies these strategies. The Maximal Self believes that it can change and improve, and this very belief allows change and improvement. The dogma of human plasticity tends to fulfill itself.
3
Drugs, Germs, and Genes:
The Age of Biological
Psychiatry
FOR ALL THEIR CURRENCY, self-improvement and psychotherapy are viewed by many with skepticism and even disdain, for this is also the age of biological psychiatry, with its biomedical vision of emotion, personality, and mental illness. It has three basic principles:
Mental illness is really physical illness.
Emotion and mood are determined by brain chemistry.
Personality is determined by genes.
All three run counter to the idea that we can change ourselves—with or without a therapist. Biological psychiatry has a radically different vision of change:
Curing the underlying physical illness cures mental illness.
Drugs cure negative emotions and moods.
Our personality is fixed.
This is the extreme position. There are many compromise positions that refer to the “interaction” of biology and environment, genetic “contribution,” “preparedness,” and genetic “predispositions.” Some of these compromises are just anesthetics, numbing us into thinking that the fundamental dispute between nature and nurture has somehow been solved or is a pseudoquestion. Much of this book is about reasonable in-between positions, but this chapter is not. It lays out the extreme position, and the extreme position is neither frivolous nor is it a straw man. It represents the bedrock beliefs of a very large part of the biomedical world. This view emerges from three momentous discoveries.
The Italian Pox, the French Pox, the English Pox
The worst epidemic of madness in recorded history began a few years after Columbus discovered the New World and continued with mounting ferocity until the beginning of our century. It afflicted the mighty—from Henry VIII to Randolph Churchill, Winston’s brilliant, erratic father—along with the ordinary. First there was a weakness in the arms and legs, then eccentricity, then downright delusions of grandeur, then global paralysis, stupor, and death. The malady took its name from its final, paralytic symptom: general paresis.
By 1884, the asylums of Europe burst with men in the final stages of this disease, shrieking obscenities. Controversy swirled over its cause. Established opinion, led by the dean of German psychiatry, Wilhelm Griesinger, held that paresis comes from loose living, especially from inhaling bad cigars. A minority—empirical scientists rather than armchair psychiatrists, among them the young Richard von Krafft-Ebing—held that it comes from syphilis.
Griesinger would have none of this. How could it come from