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Psychologist Dmitry Leontiev — about why positive psychology does not solve problems, but prevents them, whether uncertainty is dangerous and whether it is necessary to deal with anxiety about the future.
The name of our laboratory is divided into two parts: on the one hand, it has a personality and motivation, and on the other, positive psychology. Appeal to the concepts of personality and motivation connects us with a vast area of general psychology, which has been developing at an accelerated pace in recent decades.
For example, the psychology of motivation today has nothing to do with the discipline that was called that 50 years ago. If earlier it seemed that there are separate desires and motives that can be isolated and studied separately, now it is obvious that their study is intertwined with cognitive psychology and with the psychology of activity regulation.
The realization has come that psychology misses the reality in which a person not only survives and adapts, but also strives to live well
If for most of the twentieth century, personality psychology studied the diagnosable stable properties of a person that predict his future behavior, then now the focus has shifted to what allows us to change, adapt to changing situations. The world is becoming more dynamic and complex, hence a whole range of challenges that were not presented in such a clear form in the XNUMXth century.
We are now dealing with a situation that my teacher Alexander Asmolov called «a changing personality in a changing world.» Using another formula by Lyudmila Antsyferova, we can say that our laboratory is trying to answer the question: «How to change yourself without changing yourself?».
Why People Don’t Become Happier by Solving All Problems
Throughout the 15th century, psychology was mainly engaged in correcting dislocations, eliminating some shortcomings, imperfections, and violations in a person (these were the most urgent, urgent problems). But about XNUMX years ago, the realization came that psychology misses the reality in which a person not only survives and adapts, but also strives to live well. This is the reality that positive psychology studies.
It turned out that if a person is cured of all diseases, he will not become healthy, health is a different quality. Just like solving all problems, people will not become happier. What happens in the «positive» zone is based on other laws than what happens in the «negative» zone of human functioning. As the founder of positive psychology Martin Seligman says: “We know how to get from point -7 to point -2 or 0, but we don’t know how to get from point +1 to point +4.”
It turned out that if a person is cured of all diseases, he will not become healthy, health is a different quality.
In positive psychology, the emphasis has shifted to prevention, to the cultivation of character, virtues, strengths of a person, his psychological resources, which help him prevent the occurrence of many problems in advance and not become a client of clinical psychologists.
Psychology of peaks of personality
As early as the 1930s, two great psychologists, Viktor Frankl and Lev Vygotsky, began talking about a “peak psychology” or “psychology of the peaks of personality,” which is opposed to both deep and surface psychology. Higher specific human manifestations, forms of motivation and personality structure are the sphere of my interests, and the work of the laboratory is built around them. This is everything that has to do with self-regulation, the ability to take responsibility, the mechanisms of personal growth.
You can respond to any challenge in two ways — avoid it or accept it. To accept a challenge means to become more complicated in response, to try to keep up with the world. Of course, we will still not be able to cover everything, the world will develop faster, but the path of complication, the realization of our human resources and the development of our potential is a worthy human path. However, in the modern world, the choice between these two strategies is not a matter of life and death, there are many opportunities to develop and the same mass of opportunities not to develop, there are many very different niches, so this is largely a matter of taste.
Uncertainty: ways of interaction
In Russia, not only the future is unpredictable, but also the past and the present. People see the same picture and consider it from the standpoint of different explanatory models. Therefore, uncertainty seems to me now one of the most important psychological problems.
Uncertainty is a pretty heavy load. for a person. Especially for those who believe that certainty is the norm. People differ in their tolerance for uncertainty, in their willingness to accept that uncertainty is part of our lives. And those who manage to come to terms and understand that life cannot be lived without uncertainty turn out to be much more successful in coping with it and in solving the problems of choice.
Certainty is always relative, and often self-deceiving
It is possible to cite as an analogy the attitude to any element. Uncertainty is the element exactly the same as, say, water. If a person does not know how to swim, then he experiences horror in relation to deep water. But if he can swim, if he has the necessary competencies to interact with this uncontrollable and unpredictable element, then he can find a way to coexist with it and even enjoy it.
And you need to start with the understanding that this is how the world works (there is always uncertainty in it) and there is no other way. Certainty is always relative, and often it is self-deception. There is a proverb: “If you want to make God laugh, start talking about your plans.”
Anxiety in Moderate Doses Is Normal
It is important not to confuse fear of the future with anxiety about the future. Anxiety is a negative, uncomfortable emotion, but it expresses an important objective reality — the future is unpredictable. Our anxiety about the future is to some extent a reflection of the peculiarity that it is not given to us to foresee the future. A person who is not anxious about the future is a pathology. Because the future is, by definition, uncertain. To try to pretend that this uncertainty does not exist, to try to pretend that I know exactly what will happen, means to claim the status of God.
Anxiety in moderation is normal inevitable and even useful. And if you try to get rid of it, this only leads to the fact that it intensifies, becomes disproportionately large and takes on pathological forms. There is no need to fight anxiety, it is important to be able to coexist with it, to keep it within moderate limits.
Now we have another round of increased uncertainty. I would recommend everyone to read Nassim Taleb’s books «The Black Swan» and «Antifragility» — bestsellers available in Russian. Nassim Taleb quite reasonably writes that all the most significant things that happen to us in our personal lives, in business, and in politics are all events that could not be predicted in advance. By trying to predict the future based on the extrapolation of the present, we deceive ourselves and deny ourselves the ability to react quickly to what will actually happen. The future is that which is not yet. It is important to be prepared for what has not yet been, and not to pretend that we can foresee and calculate it. This is the main advice I would give.
If you believe that you can influence something, then you can really
And yet — rely on what directly surrounds you, be attentive to the present, look for resources in yourself and your loved ones. Do not pay too much attention to the media, to politicians and ideologues, they have an extremely remote relation to the reality that most affects your life.
If you believe that you can influence something, then you really can. There is a concept in psychology called a self-fulfilling prophecy. The worldview is always confirmed. Only in one case it is confirmed for your benefit, in the other — to your detriment. A person who believes that he is able to influence events acts differently than a person who does not believe. And everyone comes to the results to which his own actions lead.
1 Source: hse.ru/news/life/140368417.html