Look Forward, Not Backward

For decades now cognitive therapists have been helping us to dig our way out of the profession’s Freudian funk. When Aaron Beck discovered that psychoanalysis was useless in treating depression, he developed other techniques. In particular, he taught his patients to develop a more balanced view of their self-deprecating thoughts. He saw that these owed nothing to Freud.

When Martin Seligman advanced cognitive therapy he sought to help his patients to gain a more positive sense of their lives. In naming his field positive psychology Seligman was countering the bleak and tragic Freudian vision that had cast a pall over the field and over far too many people’s lives. As has often been noted, not least by yours truly, Freudian mythmaking is relentlessly negative. It tells patients that they need to be strong enough to face the horrors of their unconscious desires. The result is more, not less depression. Most honest psychoanalysts have figured out that their discipline does not treat or cure mental illness.

Now, Seligman and others are taking the next step. They are trying to rid our thinking of the notion that therapy involves dredging up the past, even retelling the story of our lives. As you can readily understand, if you are looking backward you are much more likely to walk into walls.

The authors also reject the notion, noted a week ago on the blog, that we ought to live in the present. They have discovered that the human mind and human well-being is based on our relationship with the future. Again, I addressed the point in my post last week.

Of course, envisioning future possibilities belongs to the world of policy analysis. Planning for the future and implementing the plan effectively is not what anyone would call medical practice. Seligman, along with John Tierney, lays out the case for directing our attention to the future. He argues cogently that the human mind is distinct for its ability to evaluate many different futures. But he does not explain how one decides which action to take in favor of which future. There are no scientific facts about the future.

For the moment, we will leave these questions aside and examine the arguments that Seligman and Tierney presented in the New York Times, yesterday:

Looking into the future, consciously and unconsciously, is a central function of our large brain, as psychologists and neuroscientists have discovered — rather belatedly, because for the past century most researchers have assumed that we’re prisoners of the past and the present.

Behaviorists thought of animal learning as the ingraining of habit by repetition. Psychoanalysts believed that treating patients was a matter of unearthing and confronting the past. Even when cognitive psychology emerged, it focused on the past and present — on memory and perception.

As it happens, we are not mired in the past. Only misguided therapists insist that we turn away from the present in order to reconstruct the past. We are, the authors explain, prospective beings. We orient ourselves and our actions by considering future prospects and possibilities:

But it is increasingly clear that the mind is mainly drawn to the future, not driven by the past. Behavior, memory and perception can’t be understood without appreciating the central role of prospection. We learn not by storing static records but by continually retouching memories and imagining future possibilities. Our brain sees the world not by processing every pixel in a scene but by focusing on the unexpected.

Thus, psychologists are discovering that emotions are not recollections of past trauma and are not reactions to present situations. They are giving us information that will guide our future actions. Of course, we are obliged to evaluate a current situation before deciding what to do to counteract it or to profit from it:

Our emotions are less reactions to the present than guides to future behavior. Therapists are exploring new ways to treat depression now that they see it as primarily not because of past traumas and present stresses but because of skewed visions of what lies ahead.

Guiding a patient toward a more constructive future. Teaching him or her how to make plans and to implement those plans. Showing how to look forward, not backward. Surely, those are positive steps. It will be interesting to see how psychologists try to practice this form of personal policy analysis.

Researchers are affirming these points. They have observed that people spend far more time thinking about the future than about the past:

If traditional psychological theory had been correct, these people would have spent a lot of time ruminating. But they actually thought about the future three times more often than the past, and even those few thoughts about a past event typically involved consideration of its future implications.

The key to positive psychology and to consequential action and to having a sense of purpose is to make plans. It's like the difference between having a road map and flying blind:

When making plans, they reported higher levels of happiness and lower levels of stress than at other times, presumably because planning turns a chaotic mass of concerns into an organized sequence. Although they sometimes feared what might go wrong, on average there were twice as many thoughts of what they hoped would happen.

The authors continue that depression involves a hopeless attitude toward the future. It also suggests that one can do nothing about it. Obviously, when drawing up a plan one is manifesting a confidence in the chance that things will turn out for the better, if not the best. Drawing up a plan and implementing it is far more constructive than simply repeating, after me: things will get better:

While most people tend to be optimistic, those suffering from depression and anxiety have a bleak view of the future — and that in fact seems to be the chief cause of their problems, not their past traumas nor their view of the present. While traumas do have a lasting impact, most people actually emerge stronger afterward. Others continue struggling because they over-predict failure and rejection. Studies have shown depressed people are distinguished from the norm by their tendency to imagine fewer positive scenarios while overestimating future risks.

Interestingly, research is showing that even when people do look back at the past in order to reconstruct their memories, they are working to improve their ability to function in the present and to plan for the future. They are not trying to find the unadulterated historical truth or to discover what they really, really wanted.  They are evaluating present possibilities in terms of what happened in the past. They are using the past to set themselves on a better course for future actions:

The fluidity of memory may seem like a defect, especially to a jury, but it serves a larger purpose. It’s a feature, not a bug, because the point of memory is to improve our ability to face the present and the future. To exploit the past, we metabolize it by extracting and recombining relevant information to fit novel situations.

People do not dwell on the past because, the authors say, there is nothing you can do to change it. And people are less preoccupied with death than some people imagine, because there is nothing you can do about that either:

Homo prospectus is too pragmatic to obsess on death for the same reason that he doesn’t dwell on the past: There’s nothing he can do about it. He became Homo sapiens by learning to see and shape his future, and he is wise enough to keep looking straight ahead.