Professor Martin E.P. Seligman, the (then) president of the American Psychological Association, in the April 28, 1998, edition of The New York Times, Science News section. The article begins:
Psychologists rarely think much about what makes people happy. They focus on what makes them sad, on what makes them anxious. That is why psychology journals have published 45,000 articles in the last 30 years on depression, but only 400 on joy. . . . .
It was not always like that. When psychology began developing as a profession, it had three goals: to identify genius, to heal the sick and to help people live better, happier lives. Over the last half century, however, it has focused almost entirely on pathology, taking the science of medicine, itself structured around disease, as its model. . . .
’That is an imbalance,’ says Martin E.P. Seligman, the new president of the American Psychological Association, and one that he is determined to change. Dr. Seligman, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania . . . has a strategy for reforming a profession he thinks has gone awry. . . .
’Psychology,’ he said, ‘has been negative essentially for 100 years. Theories have generally focused on damage, as have techniques for intervention. Social science has believed negative things were authentic and strengths were coping mechanisms,’ he said. . . .
But what he sees in his (own) children are ‘pure, unadulterated strengths that are not compensations for trauma, but intrinsic.’ Seligman says, ‘I find myself beginning to believe psychology needs to ask, what are the virtues? We need to delineate them, assess them, ask causal questions. What are the interactions? How does it grow? Let’s talk of growth and questions of strength. . . .’
’Rather than spending $10 million on, say, phobias and fears,’ he says, ‘study courage.'
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