Becoming you

I just finished a class on lifespan development, and one of the most interesting bits for me (aside from more gruesome details on aging, just the thing to perk up a 50-year-old) was a previously unfamiliar model for how adolescents/young adults go through the process of separating from their parents and forming their own identity.

Psychologist James Marcia laid out four basic states in this process:

• In foreclosure, a young person has happily accepted the big choices -- career, ideological viewpoint -- that were promoted by parents and other adult authority figures. No identity crisis, little self-reflection required, high levels of commitment.
• With diffusion, the key difference is motivation -- there isn't much. The young person avoids an identity crisis and the obligation of making any firm commitments in favor of immediate gratification and a "whatever comes along" approach to life.
• The moratorium stage means the person is still working on defining himself. The process may take a long time, and may be put off until circumstances are more favorable for self-exploration.
• Identity achievement is the hoped-for result of such work. The person lives by an independently formulated moral code that guides future choices. Identity crisis and self-searching are the only way to get here, so the first two stages rule this out as an option.

With even minimal reflection, I can identify people in each of these stages and seem to be more or less fine with it. I know some who've taken the life that was essentially laid out for them and seemed to be quite satisfied with the results. I know chronic goofs who've never seemed to be too bothered by the idea of purpose in life. I know 50-somethings who are still hard at work finding themselves and would seem to run out of steam if they ever got there. Still others have had a solid sense of themselves for ages and stuck with it.

For me, I identify a lot with the moratorium phase. I firmly put off any work on figuring out who I was until I left home for college and then started experimenting furiously to make up for lost time.

The funny thing is that each model seems to offer a chance for a satisfying life (or misery and toil, for that matter.) Psychologists would tell you that people who get to the identity achievement stage have the more mature, fully formed personalities. But try to convince the slackers and hometown heroes at your next high school reunion that they're not really happy because they haven't endured enough inner turmoil and self-doubt. 

Book report: "Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America"

The San Francisco State program I'm working through to become a life coach is based heavily on the growing field of positive psychology, which focuses on the functional rather than the dysfunctional side of the mental spectrum.


So it seems only fair to spend some time with the principled opposition, especially if it comes in as appealing a form as Barbara Ehrenreich, a writer of tremendous power and conviction who's done much to awaken America to the plight of its growing underclass.


With "Bright-sided," Ehrenreich takes aim at the many-tentacled self-industry, including positive psychology and its founder, Martin Seligman.


Ehrenreich clearly starts off with a personal beef surrounding her recent treatment for breast cancer and the relentless positive thinking promotion that made her feel infantalized and negated. From there, she goes on to build a bigger case that the myriad sources promoting positive thinking in American life are:

• Undermining our intelligence.
• Blinding us to injustice and inequality.
• Promoting the kind of magical thinking that helped set the stage for the mortgage crisis and other catastrophes.

There's a lot of thought here and some solid reasoning, but Ehrenreich paints with an awfully large brush. Lumping Seligman, "The Secret" author Rhonda Byrne and Christian Science originator Mary Baker Eddy into an amorphous philosophical blob really does justice to none of them.


Byrne, for instance, takes a basic fact of life -- instant karma's gonna get you -- and flattens it into a "dream it, get it" message that ignores the hard work part of the equation. Christian Science -- well, let's not even go there.

Positive psychology, on the other hand, looks at optimism/pessimism from the basic standpoint that underlies most mental health: Which better serves the individual?


From that view, it's not hard to make the case for optimism. It's more likely to lead the person to act, and "anything + work" is a better formula for success than "anything - work."


"Optimism" here means consistently erring somewhat on the positive side when predicting future outcomes -- always erring on the positive side, despite any evidence to the contrary, is called "delusion." Ehrenreich has some trouble distinguishing between the two, and ignores the obvious adaptive advantage of well-measured optimism. A bit of wishful thinking tends to be quite helpful for getting one's ass out bed in the morning. In fact, there's a name for people who make the most accurate predictions about future events: "clinically depressed."


So cheers to Ehrenreich for doing a bit to expose the charlatans selling a message of success without effort. (The corrosive amorality of such schemes was a favorite theme of author Wallace Stegner.) But next book, it would be good to do a little more work on knowing your opponent.