Anonymous

Evaluation of Jennifer Senior’s Article Some Dark Thoughts on Happiness

            Jennifer Senior, a contributor to New York magazine often publishes critical pieces of writing; let it be politics, economics or parenting. But all of these issues are approached from a psychological viewpoint. In the article I have chosen was published in 2006 in New York Magazine. In this rather longish article the writer digs into the issue of the emerging discipline of positive psychology.

            One of the first impressions I got of the author was that she is a self-conscious journalist, living in New York with very sarcastic style and mainly pessimistic thoughts. She tries to provide a brief history of how positive psychology developed and what are its main principles and goals at present. Since it is not a theoretical paper but a newspaper article it is not surprising that it tends to be more subjective than objective. She recounts how she herself investigated the topic personally: talking to psychology professors, researchers, and even going to “therapy”. Senior used numerous direct quotations of these professionals, I think on purpose, but their informal speech which might make them less credible for the reader. Because of her personal “research” and her not so enthusiastic attitudes towards positive thinking and happiness I felt that the article in whole is very much sarcastic and significantly biased behind the surface.

            The title of the article instantly suggests that positive psychology and the main thought behind it would not be praised in this particular piece of writing. However, the first third of Some Dark Thoughts on Happiness seems to be a somewhat objective introduction of the field. However, it is clear by the end that the author’s main idea is to question the importance, use and theoretical background of positive psychology. In the first half of the article it is not even clear how she will attack this approach. She uses quotations from positive psychology books, empirical studies and famous psychologists. But after presenting various aspects of the psychology of well-being she gets to her main point: how she thinks that positive psychological consulting and coaching is ineffective and how delusional and irrational is the state of happiness itself.

            To support this idea she presents her own example. Senior does not write down explicitly her attitudes; but the language, the choice of included quotations, structure and style reveal her point of view. Her criticism is not supported enough in my opinion, as she only presents ambiguous life stories and utterances of researchers and psychologist besides her personal thoughts on the subject.  On the last pages she starts to undermine positive psychology by presenting personal flaws and bad life choices (divorce, work-centeredness, suicide) of main supporters of positive psychology. For me it is clearly an ‘Ad Hominem’ type of logical fallacy, as these are not valid arguments which could prove the theory behind positive psychology wrong. After that, she makes references to several famous critiques, who have showed opposition to the core ideas of positive psychology. The researches that show pessimistic people have better judgment does not mean that the discipline of positive psychology or the advantages of optimistic thinking are non-existent and faulty. She generalizes quickly and jumps to the conclusions without providing sufficient support for her ideas. Finally, bringing up George Bush, the target of antipathy, to whom very few people look up to or would like to resemble to, as the typical optimistic and happy person, is clearly a try to appeal to people’s prejudices and thoughts about Bush, however, this is an insufficient argument.

            To sum up, Jennifer Senior’s criticism on the discipline of personal psychology was very personal, poorly supported and biased. I read it with a big amount of interest, open-mindedly but the reasoning and the support for her viewpoint was highly disappointing. When someone can not provide clear and valid evidence it is better not to involve the personal criticism of professionals researching and working in the field.

(659 words)

Works Cited

Senior, Jennifer. “Some Dark Thoughts On Happiness.” New York Magazine, 17 July  2006,  http://nymag.com/news/features/17573/. Accessed 1 Dec., 2011.