Pyrenees scene from Andorra
From: Andrew Phelps <math_anxiety@yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: [withholdapadues] Re: Reminder for Bay Area Folk-- Tonight!
To: withholdapadues@yahoogroups.com
Date: Sunday, August 10, 2008, 7:35 PM
Abd:
It's a mistake to think my response here is personal. Rhetorically speaking I'm a client/survivor activist and I'm speaking to perspectives that generally obtain, in the language of our "peer networking."
Anyway "positive psychology" is not my personal path but something I've come to realize is a bona fide project AGAINST the prevailing learned helplessness in "mental health." My colleague Dr. Potterton is an organizational psychologist and he teaches this to client/survivor people for credit. For him it is not "treatment" but [rather] serves as a social entree empowering insight into the present "system in shambles" (as the New Freedom Commission has it).
As for the "positive direction" - that is a project which seems to me bigger than what I know of Seligman's philosophy. I find ML King, Jr.'s advocacy of "creative maladjustment" closer to an actual statement of "positive direction."
Andrew - I realize from your posts that Seligman's positive psychology has been important to you in your life. I do not want to detract from that. After reading through each of the 66 stories of the lives of detainees who have been released from Gitmo in
McClatchy's series as well as the case studies in the PHR series Broken Lives, the effects of learned helplessness speak volumes.Exactly. This is a horror and there is no suggestion that Seligman's approach is any kind of "answer" to it. Rather his role in the "strategic helplessness of the APA" is to keep very quiet and not make waves: He has a "safety" issue.
Positive psychology will never be able to touch the damage done to these victims.
Nor should such an attempt be made. To some degree, King's advocacy may provide some of them with philosophical support – that’s the best I could say here.
What I'm saying is different than what you are reading. I'm saying that Seligman has gotten himself into a
stuck position where his advocacy against "learned helplessness" is disturbing to the APA. So he apparently treats it like a "security" issue and bites the bullet. His behavior at the SERE Conference can be interpreted as "going the extra mile," then "recoiling in horror."Until the Ethical APA movement takes on the "strategic helplessness" in full measure, with a Vision for positive change, he's going to be in an embarrassing/difficult position. So it seems to me, on the assumption that he is acting in good faith. I don't know the man, and I can't say that he's acting in good faith, but so far, I haven't heard anything to the contrary. And my brief communication with Jane Mayer indicated to me that she hasn't resolved in her mind what's happening, either.
Andrew Phelps
"It was our own moral failure and not any accident of chance, that while preserving the appearance of the Republic, we lost its reality." - Marcus Tullius Cicero, statesman, orator, writer (106-43 BCE)