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Positive psychology By Neri Livneh Tags: psychology, Israel It's hard to believe that I ever would have bought a book called "Authentic Happiness" or even browsed through it in a store. I instinctively recoil from any phrasing that smacks of New Ageism, mainly because of the damage that all the New Age prattle has done to the spoken language. Words like "happiness," "truth," "positive," "negative," "love," "desire," "accepting" and "giving" - all have lost their original meaning and become the aim of training that can be undergone with the help of various gurus. The kind of people who have changed their name to Lior, Hai, Malakhi or Ish-Hamudot (Hebrew words that evoke light, life, angels and so forth) and who, for a singularly immodest fee, will also advise us on how to add resonant letters to the name our parents gave us. But happiness is in any event not a matter for sober-minded people. Freud, and generation upon generation of his proponents and opponents, taught us that the past decisively determines how we will live and experience our life, so only by digging deeply into that past can we solve problems related to the present. I became acquainted with psychological treatment at the end of the 1970s, when I was in my twenties. In the circles I hung out with back then in Jerusalem - a city which for me existed only in the form of the neighborhoods within traveling distance from the university on bus lines No. 9 or 24 - therapy was considered not so much a means of self-help as a sign of enlightenment. Just as we went to the Cinematheque, to the Khan Theater and to certain restaurants, we all went to therapy, too (which some of us needed badly and therefore continued for a while). However, the time is past, thank God, when I would recommend therapy to every person I meet, and look askance at anyone who admits that he has never been in a psychologist's clinic. One reason for this is that therapy is indeed an excellent tool, but only for those who truly feel they have to undergo a change through it. After all, with my own eyes I've seen people who have used the fact that they were in therapy as authorization to persist in offensive, egotistical behavior; in contrast, I've encountered healthy, sensitive, self-aware and empathetic people, who achieved that state without any therapeutic help. Advertisement Unlike engineers or physicians, who can be proficient to a greater or lesser degree, the critically important element in a psychologist is his personality, good-heartedness, wisdom and world of values, which exceeds his particular form of practice. Stupid psychologists are liable to give their profession a bad name precisely in the eyes of those who need it most. I've had the good fortune to know a psychologist who is a wise and wonderful person, so I have remained an eternal devotee of psychodynamic therapy. (Maybe if that person had been a personal trainer, I would now be making my way through the world with a sculpted, low-fat body.) This is why I was apparently the last to hear about the emergence of a new type of therapy: "positive psychology." Again, because of the New Age tenet that commands us always to see the cup as half full, this term also left me deeply suspicious, until I discovered that it refers to something serious (meaning academic), is based on research, and requires that its practitioners have certificates and undergo specialization. The central idea of positive psychology is that because the past cannot be changed, all we can change is how we look at it (this is also an idea that was conceived by Freud) and, through the prism of the past, how we look at our present and future. In contrast to "regular" psychology, which deals mainly with illnesses and disorders - with our weaknesses - positive psychology works by identifying our strengths and nourishing them in our everyday life. It turns out that while I was sleeping, happiness became quantifiable (though no acceptable definition for it has yet been invented, beyond the subjective feeling). American universities now have new and delightful fields such as the "study of pleasure," the "psychology of enjoyment" and "happiness research." Martin Seligman's book "Authentic Happiness" (Free Press, 2002) was recommended to me by a psychologist who specializes in cognitive-rational therapy. Since buying a copy - and studiously ignoring the concerned look of my favorite bookseller - I have been dipping into it nonstop because of its overwhelmingly positive message: that each of us can raise his happiness level and also extend the duration of the period of feeling happy. Still, and this is the bad news, there are some among us who were born with more developed skills when it comes to feeling happy. There are people on this earth who have a tendency to feel pleased most of the time (but they are not part of my circle of friends) and will also not be visiting a psychologist's clinic or have any need for Seligman's book. A former president of the American Psychological Association, Seligman is today the foremost authority on positive psychology and happiness studies. His underlying assumption is that understanding suffering, its causes and the means for alleviating it during hard times (by pharmaceutical treatment, for example) is irrelevant to understanding happiness and what causes it. Happiness is not just the absence of suffering; it is something that is also defined positively by means of concepts such as hope, sense of purpose, self-realization, pleasure and gratification. Happiness - amazing that no one thought of this until now - is the most effective medicine against despair and wretchedness. But before we can achieve happiness we have to examine ourselves using all kinds of questionnaires. Psychometric questionnaires are my great hobby, so I found myself filling them out while figuring out which answer would help me achieve the highest possible score on each test. (Using this technique as a young woman, I obtained a record score in officer-candidacy tests in the army - though in practice I was clearly a worse-than-average officer - and also to gain admittance to all kinds of university departments in which I had no interest.) Reader, you will be overjoyed to learn that nearly 100 percent of people in my age group, with my educational level and the same area code are ranked below me in creativity, altruism, humor, good judgment, planning ahead, love of family and friends, intellectual curiosity and whatnot. I also learned that I am happier than 70 percent of people in my age/area-code/educational and even occupational groups. Even as I was tormenting myself with the question of why, if everything is so good it feels so bad, I decided on a new tactic. Imbued with values of integrity and frankness, I did the questionnaire that examines my level of depression. According to my score, there is only one small step between me and the stage where someone recommends that I get help urgently. So, we are left with one of two possibilities: Either it is possible to be very happy and supremely depressed simultaneously, or honesty is the true enemy of happiness. Bookmark to del.icio.us   Voice of peace silenced Israeli peace pioneer Abie Nathan dies aged 81. DeadSeaScrolls.com World's oldest Bible fragments to be available online.

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