Read What You Can Change . . . And What You Can't*: The Complete Guide to Successful Self-Improvement for Free Online Page A
Authors: Martin E. Seligman
remains interrupted. I have realized why I can analyze myself only with the help of knowledge obtained objectively (like an outsider). True self-analysis is impossible; otherwise there would be no neurotic illness. 10
When the analysand and the analyst are the same, the conflicts that distort thinking and impede insight are insuperable.
For other booters, the means of human advancement was changing the social institutions. These reformers founded public libraries, installed universal schooling, advocated rehabilitation of criminals, urged moral treatment of the insane, marched for women’s suffrage and abolition of slavery, and founded Utopian communities. They still march today. Marx epitomized this view of change: Humans are prisoners of the capitalistic economic system; change the economic system, put the means of production into the hands of the workers, and thereby change humanity for the better.
Out of this group, the idea of a “social science” emerged. In the wake of Chicago’s Haymarket Riot of 1886, in which seventy policemen were injured and one killed by armed strikers, class warfare became apparent to American opinion makers. Their explanation of bad behavior shifted from bad character (immutable and individual) to poverty and social class (changeable and general). The cure was to improve the environment of the lower class, since the individual perpetrators were not responsible. Theologians asked “not how every individual was responsible, but how they could be responsible for the many who were not.” 11 The science of social institutions took this program as its agenda.
For still other booters, the means of change was to manipulate the environmental contingencies that affect the individual. The behaviorists, led by John Watson, told us that the child is totally a product of the environment. Watson said in 1920 that the only way to change
is to remake the individual by changing his environment in such a way that new habits have to form. The more completely they change, the more the personality changes. Few individuals can do all this unaided. 12
The science of learning theory was dedicated to this proposition (B. F. Skinner was the most popular recent advocate of this worldview).
All these propositions share the notion that people will change. But they need to be booted into it—by a therapist, by reformed social institutions, by benevolent manipulation of the environment. People can’t change on their own. The booters are the heirs of Francis Bacon.
The bootstrappers are the heirs of the individualism of Pico, Arminius, and Wesley. The agent of change is the self: Human beings can lift themselves by their own bootstraps.
For some of the bootstrappers, self-improvement had theological roots, derived from Wesley and nineteenth-century liberal Protestantism melded with the American doctrine of “rugged individualism.” Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking , published in 1952, and Robert Schuller’s present-day Sunday-morning preaching in the Crystal Cathedral have touched the lives of tens of millions of Americans. 13 Individuals believe that they can achieve success in this world by improving themselves, and salvation in the next by good works. Emile Coué, the French pharmacist who urged turn-of-the-century pill takers to accompany their medication with the thought “Every day and in every way, I am becoming better and better,” was a worthy secular forerunner of these contemporary religious bootstrappers.
Humanistic psychologists are also bootstrappers. Abraham Maslow urged “self-actualization” as the highest form of human motivation, though it is only when more basic needs—like food, safety, love, and self-esteem—are slaked that we can achieve it. The ideas of will, responsibility, and freedom command center stage in existential and humanistic psychotherapy; patients can even have disorders of will, and therapy emphasizes widening the capacity to choose.
The
When the analysand and the analyst are the same, the conflicts that distort thinking and impede insight are insuperable.
For other booters, the means of human advancement was changing the social institutions. These reformers founded public libraries, installed universal schooling, advocated rehabilitation of criminals, urged moral treatment of the insane, marched for women’s suffrage and abolition of slavery, and founded Utopian communities. They still march today. Marx epitomized this view of change: Humans are prisoners of the capitalistic economic system; change the economic system, put the means of production into the hands of the workers, and thereby change humanity for the better.
Out of this group, the idea of a “social science” emerged. In the wake of Chicago’s Haymarket Riot of 1886, in which seventy policemen were injured and one killed by armed strikers, class warfare became apparent to American opinion makers. Their explanation of bad behavior shifted from bad character (immutable and individual) to poverty and social class (changeable and general). The cure was to improve the environment of the lower class, since the individual perpetrators were not responsible. Theologians asked “not how every individual was responsible, but how they could be responsible for the many who were not.” 11 The science of social institutions took this program as its agenda.
For still other booters, the means of change was to manipulate the environmental contingencies that affect the individual. The behaviorists, led by John Watson, told us that the child is totally a product of the environment. Watson said in 1920 that the only way to change
is to remake the individual by changing his environment in such a way that new habits have to form. The more completely they change, the more the personality changes. Few individuals can do all this unaided. 12
The science of learning theory was dedicated to this proposition (B. F. Skinner was the most popular recent advocate of this worldview).
All these propositions share the notion that people will change. But they need to be booted into it—by a therapist, by reformed social institutions, by benevolent manipulation of the environment. People can’t change on their own. The booters are the heirs of Francis Bacon.
The bootstrappers are the heirs of the individualism of Pico, Arminius, and Wesley. The agent of change is the self: Human beings can lift themselves by their own bootstraps.
For some of the bootstrappers, self-improvement had theological roots, derived from Wesley and nineteenth-century liberal Protestantism melded with the American doctrine of “rugged individualism.” Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking , published in 1952, and Robert Schuller’s present-day Sunday-morning preaching in the Crystal Cathedral have touched the lives of tens of millions of Americans. 13 Individuals believe that they can achieve success in this world by improving themselves, and salvation in the next by good works. Emile Coué, the French pharmacist who urged turn-of-the-century pill takers to accompany their medication with the thought “Every day and in every way, I am becoming better and better,” was a worthy secular forerunner of these contemporary religious bootstrappers.
Humanistic psychologists are also bootstrappers. Abraham Maslow urged “self-actualization” as the highest form of human motivation, though it is only when more basic needs—like food, safety, love, and self-esteem—are slaked that we can achieve it. The ideas of will, responsibility, and freedom command center stage in existential and humanistic psychotherapy; patients can even have disorders of will, and therapy emphasizes widening the capacity to choose.
The
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