50 Psychology Classics (16 page)

Many creative achievers were either orphaned or had little contact with their father. On the other hand, they frequently had a very involved, loving mother who expected a lot from them.

Most fell into one of two family categories: They were poor or disadvantaged, but their parents nevertheless pushed them to educational or career attainment; or they grew up in families of intellectuals, researchers, professionals, writers, musicians, and so on. Only 10 percent were middle class. The lesson: To be a powerfully creative adult, it is best to be brought up in a family that values intellectual endeavor, not one that celebrates middle-class comfort.

The creative are both humble and proud, with a selfless devotion to their domain and what might be achieved, yet also confidence that they have much to contribute and will make their mark.

It is a myth that there is one “creative personality.” Something all creative people seem to share is complexity—they “tend to bring the entire range of human possibilities within themselves.”

Csikszentmihalyi says that it would be too easy to see creative people as a privileged elite. Rather, their lives are a message that we should all be able to find work that is fulfilling and that we love. As he notes, most of the people in the study did not come from privileged backgrounds, but had to struggle to do what they wanted in the face of economic or family pressures. Some of the respondents felt that their greatest achievement, in fact, was having created their own lives or careers without recourse to social expectation.

Why should we really care about creativity? Csikszentmihalyi's work on the flow experience found that it occurs most readily when people are engaged in “designing or discovering something new.” We are happiest when we are being creative because we lose our sense of self and get the feeling that we are part of something greater. We are actually programmed to get satisfaction and pleasure from discovery and creativity, he says, because its results lead to our survival as a species. New ideas are needed more than ever if the planet is going to survive, and the best ones are likely to come from genuinely creative people.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi was born in 1934 in Fiume on the Adriatic, and his father was the Hungarian consul of what was then an Italian city. The family name means “Saint Michael from the province of Csik,” Csik being originally a Hungarian province
.

Csikszentmihalyi spent his adolescence in Rome, helping to run the family restaurant while receiving a classical education. After graduating he worked as a photographer and travel agent. He enrolled at the University of Chicago in 1958, where he received a BA and PhD. Though he was more interested in the ideas of Carl Jung, he was required to study behaviorist psychology, and only later during his years as a professor at Chicago was he able to develop his theories on flow, creativity, and the self
.

Since 1999 Csikszentmihalyi has been a professor at Claremont Graduate University in California, where his Quality of Life Research Center explores aspects of positive psychology
.

Other books include
Beyond Boredom and Anxiety
(1975),
The Evolving Self: A Psychology for the Third Millennium
(1993), and
Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life
(1997)
.

“You can never expect to be deliriously happy at all times in life. Freedom from all physical pain is never likely to be your lot. But an extraordinary lack of mental and emotional woe may be yours—if you think that it may be and work for what you believe in.”

“Man is a uniquely language-creating animal and he begins to learn from very early childhood to formulate his thoughts, perceptions, and feelings in words, phrases, and sentences… If this is so (and we know of no evidence to the contrary), then for all practical purposes the phrases and sentences that we keep telling ourselves usually are or become our thoughts and emotions.”

In a nutshell

If we know how we generate negative emotions through particular thoughts, especially irrational ones, we have the secret to never being desperately unhappy again.

In a similar vein
Nathaniel Branden
The Psychology of Self-Esteem
(p 42)
David D. Burns
Feeling Good
(p 58)
Martin Seligman
Authentic Happiness
(p 254)

A Guide to Rational Living
is one of the most enduring books in the popular psychology literature, selling over a million copies. Since it was published over 40 years ago, thousands of “inspirational” titles have come and gone, but it continues to change people's lives.

The book brought to public attention a new form of psychology, “rational emotive therapy” (RET), that went against decades of orthodox Freudian psychoanalysis and sparked a revolution in psychology. RET says that emotions do not arise as a result of repressed desires and needs, as Freud insisted, but directly from our thoughts, ideas, attitudes, and beliefs. It is not the mysterious unconscious that matters most to our psychological health, but the humdrum statements we say to ourselves on a daily basis. Added up, these represent our philosophy of life, one that can quite easily be altered if we are willing to change what we habitually say to ourselves.

Reasoning your way out of emotional tangles seems doubtful, but Ellis's pioneering ideas, and four decades of cognitive psychology, have shown that the theory does indeed work.

Human beings, Ellis and Harper note, are language-creating animals. We tend to formulate our emotions and our ideas in terms of words and sentences. These effectively become our thoughts and emotions. Therefore, if we are basically the things we tell ourselves, any type of personal change requires us to look first at our internal conversations. Do they serve us or undermine us?

Talk therapy aims to reveal the “errors in logic” that people believe to be true. If, for instance, we are having terrible feelings of anxiety or fear, we are asked to track back to the original thought in the sequence of thoughts that led to our current anxiety. We invariably find that we are saying things to ourselves such as “Wouldn't it be terrible if…” or “Isn't it horrible that I am…” It is at this point that we have to intervene and ask ourselves
why
exactly it would be so terrible if such and such happened, or whether our current situation is
really
as bad as we say. And even if it is, will it last forever?

This sort of self-questioning at first seems naïve, but by doing it we begin to see just how much our internal sentences shape our life. After all, if we
label some event a “catastrophe,” it surely will become one. We can only live up to our internal statements, whether they make something good, bad, or neutral.

How is it that human beings have conquered space and the atom, but most of us can't get ourselves out of bad moods? As we have advanced materially, it seems that the level of neurosis and psychosis in society has only risen; the main challenge for people today is gaining control over their emotional lives.

In a chapter titled “The art of never being desperately unhappy,” Ellis and Harper argue that misery and depression are always states of mind, since they are self-perpetuated. When we are dejected after the loss of a relationship or a job, for instance, this is quite understandable. However, if we allow the feeling to linger, it builds strength. Things snowball so that we become “miserable with our own misery,” instead of trying to see the situation rationally.
A Guide to Rational Living
notes that it is “virtually impossible to sustain an emotional outburst without bolstering it by repeated ideas.” Something will remain “bad” in our mind only as long as we tell ourselves it is. If we do not keep creating the bad feeling, how can it possibly endure? Granted, if we are experiencing physical pain we cannot simply ignore it, but once it is over there is no automatic link between stimulus and feeling.

Even in the 1960s, Ellis was saying that drugs were problematic in treating depression, because once a person stopped taking them, they tended to become depressed again. Permanent change required them to actually change their thinking so that they could “talk themselves out of” persistent negative feelings whenever they surfaced. He shrewdly observed that some people secretly enjoy being depressed, because they don't have to take any action to change. In some cases, we have to decide that we will not be depressed and our feelings alter accordingly.

Are human beings rational or irrational? We are both, Ellis and Harper say. We are brainy, but we still go in for puerile, idiotic, prejudiced, and selfish behavior anyway. The key to a good life is applying rationality to the most irrational sphere of life, the emotions.

In the emphasis on disciplining our own thinking and finding a middle way between extreme emotions, there are some definite echoes of Buddhism in the rational emotive approach. It acknowledges that whatever happened in our past, it is the present that matters and what we can do now to alleviate it. Ellis discovered this himself as a boy. With a troubled bipolar-affected mother, and a father often away on business trips, he took responsibility for his younger siblings, making sure they got dressed and off to school each day. When he
was hospitalized with kidney problems, his parents rarely visited him. Ellis learnt that we don't have to get upset by situations unless we allow ourselves to be, that there is always room for control of our reactions. While his brand of therapy may seem hard-nosed, in fact it represents a very optimistic view of people.

A Guide to Rational Living
helps anyone to understand how their emotions are generated and, crucially, how a reasonably happy and productive life can be yours through more care and discipline in your thinking. Its topics include lessening the need for approval, conquering anxiety, “how to be happy though frustrated,” and eradicating fear of failure. Consistent with its content, the book has a wonderfully clear and straightforward style. Get the updated and revised third edition, which contains a new chapter on research supporting the principles behind, and the techniques of, RET.