MY FAMILY AND I were driving through Yellowstone Park in the late spring of 1996 when I got the news that changed the course of my life. I went to a pay phone and found out that I had been elected president of the American Psychological Association (APA). It was then, and remains now, one of the greatest honors of my life.
A few months later, I attended the APA convention in Toronto as president-elect-elect (I’d become president-elect the following year and president the year after that). I was told that there was no place for me to sit on the floor of council, and while the rank and file greeted me warmly, even effusively, I got one cold shoulder after another from the establishment, whose chosen candidate I had soundly defeated in the election. I returned from Toronto dismayed, wondering if I could be effective on this national stage.
The answer came by way of epiphany.
“GET TO WORK, Nikki,” I shouted irritably. It was three weeks after the Toronto convention, and I was low. We were supposed to be weeding. Nikki, however, was having a great time, throwing weeds in the air, dancing, and singing. She startled when I shouted at her, walked away, and slowly walked back.
“Daddy, can I talk to you?”
I nodded.
“Well, on my birthday, I decided that I was going to stop whining, and that was the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” Nikki Seligman said. “And if I can stop whining, you can stop being such a grouch.” Nikki Seligman and the author, 1996. Photo courtesy of Mandy Seligman.
“Daddy, do you remember before my fifth birthday I was a whiner, I whined every day?”
I nodded.
“Have you noticed that since my fifth birthday, I haven’t whined once?”
I nodded.
“Well, on my birthday, I decided that I was going to stop whining, and that was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. And if I can stop whining, you can stop being such a grouch.”
I was stunned. Nikki was exactly right.
First, I was a grouch and proud of it. But it occurred to me for the very first time that maybe any success I’d had was not because I could see every flaw—because of my “critical intelligence”—but in spite of it. If Nikki could change, so could I. I decided to change.
Second, my “remedial” view of raising my children was wrong. If I could correct all my kid’s errors—shouting at Nikki’s indolence—I would somehow end up with an exemplary child. What nonsense. Instead I had to identify what Nikki was really good at—and I’d just seen it: gleaning insight into other people—reward it, and help her to lead her life around her strengths, not waste her time thanklessly correcting her weaknesses.
Most significantly, I got the idea that powered the rest of my life: psychology could be explicitly about building the good life. The current practice and science of psychology was half-baked. Psychology started with the premise that not getting it wrong equaled getting it right. If psychology could somehow eliminate all the ills of the world—mental illness, prejudice, ignorance, poverty, pessimism, loneliness, and the like—human life would be at its best. But the absence of ill-being does not equal the presence of well-being. Psychology could be about the presence of happiness not merely about the absence of unhappiness.
Not getting it wrong does not equal getting it right.
IN JANUARY 1997, I threw myself into my work as president-elect of APA. The possibility of a psychology of well-being had been percolating. But it seemed like a long shot, and I wanted my presidency to leave a mark. So on the day my term began, I hit the ground running and started work on other, less adventurous initiatives. I visited with Steve Hyman, the young director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). Steve was no colorless Washington bureaucrat, but a world-class intellect and former professor of neuropsychiatry at Harvard. He and I shared a passion: empirical evidence in treatment.
“Steve,” I said, “I won by the largest vote in APA history, and I have a mandate. We have an opening here to change the course of APA. Let’s launch a program on evidence-based psychotherapy.”
“If you can bring recalcitrant-old-APA into the fold, Marty,” Steve said, “I will find $40 million to support the research.”
VISIONS OF COOPERATION between science and practice and the salvation of APA danced in my head. I asked to attend a meeting of the influential Council for the Advancement of Private Practice and Science (CAPPS)—which had backed the losing candidate in the APA election but remained vitally important to the discipline—to explain my vision. The council deigned to allot me fifteen minutes, and I had my first encounter with the machine I had just humiliated.
It did not go well.
About twenty stony-faced committee members sat around an enormous table in one of the many well-appointed seminar rooms in the luxurious new APA office building. APA’s treasurer, Jack MacKay, had wisely invested in Washington, DC, real estate, and APA was now worth $100 million. It was perhaps the only national professional organization well in the black.
I launched into my pitch. The council members stared at me as if I were an exotic bird that had flown in off course from another planet, and my voice got louder than I wanted it to be. They stared. I couldn’t seem to make my voice softer and less shrill. These people hated me. I thought, “I have defeated them in the election, and they will have their revenge.” As I described the possibilities for putting psychotherapy on a lasting evidence-based platform, their faces got even stonier and their stares more hostile. I concluded by telling them that NIMH was willing to spend an unheard-of amount—$40 million—to underwrite the search for evidence.
This was my applause line. There was dead silence. One question cut through the quiet, asked by Stan Moldawsky, the group’s next president-designate.
“What if the evidence does not come out in our favor?”
RON LEVANT, STAN’S right hand, took me out for a drink. Brimming with good cheer and friendliness, he said, “Marty, you are in deep shit.”
I HAVE HAD a lot of good advice in my life, but since my student days, I’d had only one true mentor: Ray Fowler. Ray was the CEO of APA, and unlike the presidents who come and go, he was its institutional memory. He defined his role as bringing out the best in its presidents. Years after that meeting he confided in me that his best quality was his willingness to suffer fools gladly, and at that moment I knew whom he had in mind.
Ray hailed from Alabama, where he was a well-known personality psychologist, dissecting the characters of such celebrities as Howard Hughes, and chairing the department of psychology at the university. He was the soft-spoken, moderate, and civilized face of the “dirty dozen,” the practitioners who had seized power from the science wing fifteen years before, and he was immediately elected president of APA.
APA happened to collapse at that moment. Having invested heavily in Psychology Today—a more foolish investment than Washington real estate—it was penniless. The administration was fired, and Ray was called on to become CEO. He did so, rescuing the organization, and became its near-permanent chief executive.
Ray was the very soul of patience and moderation. He was the only APA officer who advised me that my running for president was not impossibly quixotic, and he encouraged me to go for it.
In deep shit, I turned to him now.
“There are two kinds of leadership,” Ray told me after listening patiently as I described the CAPPS fiasco, “transactional and transformational. You cannot possibly out-transact these people. They sit on all the committees, and they have great sitting power. They will out-sit you. If you are not to fail, you will need to be a transformational president.
“Your job, Marty, is to transform American psychology.”
WHEN I FIRST encountered psychology, more than thirty years before my stint as APA president, two warring factions in the field—the behaviorists and the Freudians—were at a standoff. For all their differences, they shared many of the same dogmas. Both focused on misery. Neither took evolution seriously. Both believed that the past, especially childhood trauma, frog-marches us into the future. Both considered thinking and consciousness mere froth. They also shared many of the same blind spots: happiness, virtue, free will, meaning, creativity, and success. In short, they both missed everything that makes life worth living.
I have witnessed the transformation of psychology, and at more than one pivotal moment, I led the transformation. Psychology in my lifetime rejected these premises in order to remove four huge blind spots. First, the discipline abandoned behaviorism to embrace cognition and consciousness. Second, it realized that evolution and the brain constrain what we can learn. Third, it ended its fixation on only curing what is wrong to include building what is right and positive in the world. Finally, it discovered that we are drawn into the future rather than driven by the past.
Together these make up the new psychology of hope.
This book tells the story of these sweeping changes in psychology over the last five decades. I too came to reject these four dogmas, and I tell the story of how the field was transformed through the medium of how one psychologist was himself transformed.