5 ........................Chennai Chapter Report 6 ... - National HRD Network

Let me begin by making a confession. I
had one strange, if not weird habit. I used
to go through telephone directories as a
favorite pass time. However, I wanted to get
rid of this habit. So I settled for going through
dictionaries, rather than directories. I read
a variety of dictionaries, Urdu - Hindi, English
- English, English - French, Hindi - English
etc. My vocabulary did not improve, as is
evident from the limited numbers of words
that I use for writing these columns, but my
knowledge about existence of the variety of
dictionaries definitely improved. I realized
that there are dictionaries of different
disciplines available, and by some chance
one day, I found myself sitting with the
dictionary of psychology in my hands. With
some curiosity, I opened it, started flipping
through it, and then suddenly, thought that
I should look at some words that I always
use in general conversation but am not really
sure of the exact dictionary meaning of the
same. The first word that I looked for was
"hope." To my surprise I did not find any
entry for that. This increased my curiosity,
and I looked for "optimism." Same result. I
tried, "resiliency." No result. Looked at
"Gratitude." No result. I thought, let me give
it an easy one, and I tried, "Happiness." And
believe me; I was surprised to find that there
was no entry against that also.
I thought that I would try to look at some
thing negative now, and soon I was
bombarded with words which I could not
even pronounce, and could not spell
properly without the help of spell check.
Involutional melancholia (this I had to add
to my spell check dictionary), Schizophrenia
(29-entries over four pages),
dysdiadochkinesia, adiadochkinesia, (these
two also have to be added to my spell check
dictionary); I got adequate definitions,
meanings and illustrations for such
terminology. Emboldened now, in the belief
that I am on to some thing, albeit
accidentally, I tentatively moved toward web
search (of course with the help of my
daughter Jaya). I looked at the listed topics
for discussion, and glossary on some
psychology sites, and again got the similar
results.
The narration of this chain of events is not
the accounts of an eccentric and habitual
and compulsive directory/ dictionary reader,
Character Strengths and
Virtues: An Introduction - I
[Psychology of weakness and Psychology of strengths]
Column
but a reflection on the direction that the field
of psychology had taken during the past five
decades.
A search by Luthans (2002) of contemporary
literature in psychology as a whole found
approximately 200,000 published articles on
the treatment of mental illness; 80,000 on
depression; 65,000 on anxiety; 20,000 on
fear; and 10,000 on anger; but only about
1000 on positive concepts and capabilities
of people.
Let us examine, what it means!
The good news is that it signifies the
tremendous strides that we have made in
the areas of mental disorders, and illness.
To quote Peterson and Seligman (2004;
page 3):
"In recent years, strides have been made in
understanding, treating, and preventing
psychological disorders. Reflecting this
progress and critically helping to bring it
about are widely accepted classification
manuals - the Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)
sponsored by the American Psychiatric
Association (1994) and the International
Classification of Diseases (ICD) sponsored
by the World Health Organization (1990) -
which have generated a family of reliable
assessment strategies and have led to
demonstrably effective treatments for more
than a dozen disorders that only a few
decades ago were intractable."
However, the focus of psychology, in the
process had become almost lop sided.
Psychology had always had three missions:
Trying to repair damages, prevent problems,
and build strengths in people. Over the
years, society in general and research
funding sources in particular promoted
concern with what was wrong with people.
Almost exclusive attention in research and
practice became devoted to how to fix and
treat psychological problems and
weaknesses (Luthans, 2002). The pursuit
of damage repair happened at the expense
of the other two missions of psychology.
– Dr Jaydeep Lal
To quote from Seligman and
Csikszentmihalyi (2000; page 5):
"Psychology since World War II has become
a science largely about healing. It
concentrates on repairing damage within a
disease model of human functioning. This
almost exclusive attention to pathology
neglects the fulfilled individual and a thriving
community. The aim of Positive Psychology
is to begin to catalyze a change in the focus
of psychology from preoccupation only with
repairing the worst things in life to also
building the best qualities."
They suggested that psychology neglected
the possibility that building strength is the
most potent weapon in the arsenal of
therapy, and to redress the previous
imbalance, we must bring the building of
strength to the forefront in the treatment and
prevention of mental illness.
In fact way back in 1954 itself, Maslow
was airing a similar opinion. To quote
Abraham Maslow, (1954: Page 354):
"The science of psychology has been far
more successful on the negative than on
the positive side; it has revealed to us much
about man's shortcomings, his illness, his
sins, but little about his potentialities, his
virtues, his achievable aspirations, or his full
psychological height. It is as if psychology
had voluntarily restricted itself to only half
its rightful jurisdiction and that the darker,
meaner half…. We must find out not only
what psychology is but what it ought to be,
or what it might be, if it could free itself, from
the stultifying effects of limited, pessimistic,
and stingy preconceptions about human
nature."
Thus, this much keenly observed, realization
that psychology is not only about weakness
correction, or illness curing and healing, it
is also about making normal people stronger
and more productive and making high
human potential actual, led to the
development of the discipline of positive
psychology, wherein Peterson and
Seligman (2004) developed their
classification of character strengths and
virtues.
How this emphasis moved totally in favor of
repairing damage, and almost nothing else,
has been described in the most In the second part of this essay we will
comprehensive manner by Seligman and discuss about the differences between
Csikszentmihalyi (2000).
strengths and talents.
H
Dr. Jaydeep Lal, Head- iGATE Center for OD & Leadership, iGATE Global Solutions Limited, Bangalore, e-mail: jaydeep.lal@igate.com
| HRD News Letter | April 2008, Vol.24, Issue:1 13