Monday, May 22, 2017

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.

4 comments:

trigger warning said...

Nice post, SS.

The basic distinction between what you describe as "positive" psychology and p-analysis is at least partly, if not completely, due to our current, cramped, scientistic view of teleology. In a world dominated by scientistic thinking, where cause always precedes effect, it easy to understand the past-focused bias of the early psychologists (be it John Watson or Siggy Fraud).

The Stagirite and his later student, Aquinas, discussed the notion of Final Cause. Final Cause has been relegated to the dustbin of intellectual history by the materialist, scientistic academy, because a Purposeless Cosmos Narrative cannot bear it. Yet Final Cause is all around us, visible, working. Even our ditties like "mighty oaks from tiny acorns"
affirm it. Hiding deeply in the acorn is the Final Cause that causes the acorn to become a mighty oak by pulling it into the future. The oak the acorn will become preexists, indeed must preexist, the acorn.

The great logician and brilliant children's author, Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll) puts your "positive" psychology thusly:

"One day Alice came to a fork in the road and saw a Cheshire cat in a tree. ‘Which road do I take?’ she asked. ‘Where do you want to go?’ was his response. ‘I don’t know,’ Alice answered. ‘Then,’ said the cat, ‘it doesn’t matter."

We are faced with ten thousand choices a day. Not one of them is irrelevant. Any one of the can be life-affirming, or life-ending. Leaving five minutes late for a meeting can kill you in a freeway accident. Or five minutes early. If we, as individuals, have no purpose, no Final Cause, we cannot possibly know which path to take; we are on what mathematicians call a "random walk".

Interestingly, a purposeless life does not require self-control. It can truly be an "if it feels good, do it" life (a phrase, I might add, attributable in origin to the excreable Aleister Crowley's "Do as thou wilt shall be the whole of the law" philosophy).

And, I might add, the very point of self-control is a Final Cause, a teleology that pulls us, like the acorn, into a future.

And if one has no end state goal - and I don't mean tomorrow, or next week, or after graduation, or in retirement, but end state - then it really cannot possibly matter, after all is said and done, which path you took. It's worms all the way down.

Sam L. said...

"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:..."
Some people obsess about slights done to them, slights imagined, past failures...
And they become bitter.

Ares Olympus said...

Stuart: 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."

This sounds much too cutesy, as easily a process of denial than wisdom.

If you want to test whether the past can be changed, find someone whom you betrayed say 20 years ago and walked away and never looked back, and tell them now what you did, that you understand what you did, and why it was wrong. Whether they forgive you or not, you won't have to carry your remorse alone any more, or denial. You can try to forget the past, but your conscience may disagree, however fast you keep running towards a better future.

Seligman says "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."

So that's proof you can change the past. Bad memories can be retouched into better ones, if you open the prison door in your own dark secrets.

Read some Dostoevsky if you want to see how this works, but don't drink as much as he did. Russians clearly drink too much for their wisdom.

James said...

Well one facet of it is everyone with the "what can you do for me today?" attitude. If you don't produce to a lot of people you become yesterdays news, just ask ole Pompey and Scipio. The past didn't carry them very far.