THE COST OF POSITIVE THINKING
This post has three parts. Click here for the second part, “Pros and Cons”. Click here for the third part, “The Right Way”.
First published in the Philadelphia Association newsletter, February 2018.
I
NO OTHER WAY
NO OTHER WAY
The TV drama series The Americans, made by FX between 2013 and 2018, is about two Soviet agents working undercover in Washington D.C., where they live with their children as an ordinary suburban family. The show had plenty of intrigue and violence, but as the seasons went by, it increasingly developed themes of disenchantment, soul-searching and demoralisation. The Americans became remarkable for its sadness. The mood can be sampled in this dialogue between the married spies:
ELIZABETH: You know what I wish as I fall asleep every night? That I wake up and not be worried.
PHILIP: About what?
ELIZABETH: Everything.
PHILIP: You can’t live like that.
ELIZABETH: Show me another way.
It is clear that no other way exists for them, though a subplot has Philip attending Erhard Seminars Training—est for short—a programme of personal improvement which flourished in the USA in the early Eighties (when The Americans takes place). With its emphasis on overcoming mental blocks in order to think positively, est helps Philip cope with his dangerous, exhausting life.
The ritualistic approach and relentlessly upbeat philosophy of est are recalled in The Work (Jairus McLeary, 2017), a documentary about a four-day group-therapy event at Folsom State Prison, California, organised by the male-bonding movement The ManKind Project and involving civilians as well as convicts. The cathartic, confrontational, immersive process depicted on screen shares with est the idea that short-sharp-shock therapy can chase away personal demons and teach willing individuals to be less preoccupied and pessimistic, more enthusiastic and socially well-adjusted. One by one men are seen letting go of their inhibitions, writhing around boisterously as they are mentored by more experienced participants into a better outlook on life. But there are jarring moments in The Work when it seems as though the therapy is missing something important or simply railroading somebody.
One young man, an outsider not a prisoner, emerges from meditating under a blanket to say with tears in his eyes that he just remembered how happy he was as a child. It is a startlingly poignant incident because it confounds the expectation that the task is to tackle childhood trauma, past unhappiness. Before long, however, the man who glimpsed lost joy is, like everybody else, complaining about his inadequate father. The fragile, introspective sorrow the man suddenly felt seems to have been ignored by the group, presumably because the notion that contentment may have come and gone, never to return, contradicts the affirmative ideology of self-help—which insists that, with the right motivation and above all the correct instruction, it is always possible to summon up hope and confidence, and so find the other way that the fictional Elizabeth in The Americans doesn’t believe exists. The Work’s jailhouse ceremony can’t admit the possibility that sometimes hope is unrealistic, little more than a makeshift construct which screens off but can’t eliminate the negative truths of loss, grief and world-weariness.
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