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russell's conquest of happiness
In his autobiography Bertrand Russell notes that on the publication of The Conquest of Happiness in 1930, "highbrows ... considered it as a contemptible pot boiler, an escapist book," but "unsophisticated readers, for whom it was intended, liked it" and that from "professional psychiatrists, the book won very high praise."1 There are good reasons for the psychiatrists' praise. In the book, Russell brilliantly addresses the causes of unhappiness, which is the fundamental basis for psychiatric practice, and proposes both common sense and novel solutions that offer great value to psychiatric treatment. Russell's contribution to psychiatry involves three principal areas: an analysis of widespread unhappiness among otherwise successful people, a prescription for applying rational reconstructive practices to combat irrational drives resulting in unhappiness, and a revolutionary vision of embracing the healing potentials of society, nature, and the universe towards achieving balance and happiness. In what follows, I will evaluate Russell's views on these topics in the light of contemporary psychiatry and consider the possibilities for adapting more of Russell's therapeutic ideas.
Russell's analysis of widespread unhappiness is innovative in tracing its origin to social, political and economic causes. Drawing on what he describes in his autobiography as lessons he learned by painful experience, Russell identifies unhappiness as an imbalance between the willful part of one's personality and the healthy needs for physical and intellectual satisfactions.2 He then proceeds to describe unhappiness as the result of a mother's faulty rearing habits. His portrait of the frustrated mother and vulnerable infant rings true; it captures well the actual life experiences of the 1920's era middle class woman living in Britain or America about whom Russell is writing. This mother is bound to the home and in service to birthing and rearing her children. It is her cultural role. As a result, her greater potential, talents, and hopes are sacrificed. To Russell, such a burdened and resentful mother will compensate emotionally by extracting obedience from her children, favoring the more compliant ones and humiliating the more rebellious. She will enhance her own authority by filling her children with unnecessary fears about their own independence, supporting this with a corrupt religion-inspired morality. That defective morality will, for example, restrict swearing and prohibit sexual curiosity.3 Russell shows in painful detail how such a dissatisfied mother will produce a thwarted and exploited child. The child, he argues, will grow up thirsting for individual power to compensate for the lost love and the feeling of defectiveness that this has implanted in him. Self-absorption and self-aggrandizement are the key emotions that will shape this person's growing up and determine the direction of his adult life. Russell further describes how this success-prone individual will be haunted by all the signs of excessive egoism. He will envy everyone else's success. He will drive himself unmercifully at work. This will exhaust him so that only the strongest diversions or stimulants will be able to arouse excitement. He will also easily feel persecuted as he is never as highly regarded as he demands he should be. Finally, he will be constantly fatigued from all his exertions and be frightened of asserting his own tastes and desires as he struggles to preserve his social standing by remaining a member of the herd. We just have to take Russell's own example of the unhappy man driven to ruthless competition to get the full picture. Russell lays it out as follows: The working life of this man has the psychology of the hundred yard race, but as the race upon which he is engaged is one whose only goal is the grave, the concentration, which is appropriate enough for a hundred yard race, becomes ... excessive. What does he know about his children?... He has probably no men friends who are important to him.... Books seem to him futile and music high-brow.... His life [is] too concentrated and too anxious to be happy.4Such a devitalized individual reminds Russell of the dinosaurs who killed themselves off despite being the most powerful animals to have ever lived. In a few brief paragraphs, Russell presents us an impressive example of a wrecked personality, and implicit in it is Russell's indictment of a capitalistic society that produces exploitive mothers, who, in turn produce exploitive, but unhappy children. Later in the work, he gives us a way of finding happiness that liberates individuals from the indoctrinated view of puritanical capitalism with its emphasis on individual success and nationalistic dominance. Russell makes clear that happiness also needs a proper social milieu in which patients and individuals can have access to the abundant ways that the community and universe can protect and enrich people. It will take a more equitable social, political, and economic organization to produce happy people.
CAUSES OF PATHOLOGICAL UNHAPPINESS To the contemporary psychiatrist reading The Conquest of Happiness seventy-eight years after its publication in 1930, Russell's analysis of emotional disintegration fits well with standard psychiatric concepts of individual psychopathology and the impact of stress. However, very few psychiatrists would grasp the idea that it is society itself that is broadly generating these destructive forces, for they are trained narrowly to consider individual and family disturbances and not as social advocates, so in their analyses they would be unlikely to come to the radical notion that existing corporate, religious, educational, and state polices are creating widespread unhappiness. Rather, as medical specialists in treating emotional and cognitive disorders they look to discover signs and symptoms of disordered mood, disturbed thinking, and inappropriate behavior in specific individuals. Psychiatric diagnosis is based on identifying overwhelming reactions to major internal and external stresses and to explaining the specific acquired personality vulnerabilities that make such stress more destructive than need be for a particular individual. (An acquired personality vulnerability is a loss of good coping skills because parents inhibited self-assertive behaviors or the individual grew up in a restrictive social environment that thwarted the chance to become more open and assertive.) These strains produce overreactions as the emergency defensive circuits in the brain overwhelm the affected individual with psychic pain, anguished thoughts, and panicked reactions. Rather than simply producing effective flight or fight reactions, their intensity causes either too little activity so the individual become paralyzed or else too much so the individual panics. This in turn leads to breakdowns in routine self-care, self-esteem, and socially adaptive behavior. You can easily appreciate the delicate balance between adequate adjustment and maladaptive behavior by imagining what would happen if you lost your appetite, suffered regularly from disrupted sleep, couldn't carry out basic grooming, and failed to keep scheduled appointments or meetings. Such dysfunctions would soon create crisis after crisis in health, social acceptance, and work responsibilities.
Faced with acute clinical illnesses, the psychiatrist is too busy trying to help the sick to be able to address the larger social malaise that generates these problems. And the patients require so much immediate support that being told to look at the larger context would only make them more desperate. Their primary need is to restore basic functioning for themselves. They lack the strength, confidence, and energy to tackle the greater problems of the social causes of their conditions. They are like the asthmatic who must concentrate on restoring unobstructed breathing and cannot worry about the air pollution that causes his attacks. There is an additional problem for psychiatrists who advocate a social solution to psychiatric problems. In addition to restoring the patient to at least minimal social functioning, psychiatrists are taught to respect the patient's inherent dignity and autonomy in the process. While being helpful in offering specific understanding, support, and advice, psychiatrists try to avoid imposing their own personal values or philosophies on their patients and aim instead at restoring the patient's undermined autonomy and avoiding any indoctrination that would limit the patient's achieving his own healthy goals. Two prominent academic twentieth-century American psychiatrists, Fredrick Redlich of Yale and Daniel Freedman of Chicago, in their textbook The Theory and Practice of Psychiatry, emphasize that psychiatrists, much like their medical colleagues, should follow the old medical adage that describes effective treatment as "to cure few, improve many, and to comfort most".5 Note that they make no acknowledgement of the effects of the larger social context on the development of the patient's disorders. To remove the sociodestructive forces in our society, psychiatry would need reform-minded leadership. If Russell were alive today, and discussing the principles in The Conquest of Happiness before the 30,000 participants who gather at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association, his passion would stir them to action. We are waiting for that day. Despite the barriers to their identification and study, it is clear that the role of social forces and institutions as causes of mental illness deserves investigation. As an example of how economic prosperity fails to promote happiness, we find in the wealthiest country of all, the United States, that according to a 1991 National Institute of Health Five Year Catchment study, 32% of American adults in their lifetime will suffer from an emotional disorder that reaches the level of the American Psychiatric Association's diagnostic criteria and that in any given year, 20% are actually ill. But to remove the sociodestructive forces in our society, however, psychiatry would need reform-minded leadership. And where is such leadership to be found?
RATIONAL RECONSTRUCTION OF THE EGO As a prescription for the unhappiness he has described, Russell argues that the troubled individual overexposed in childhood to a the irrationalities of capitalism and materialism should undergo a personal and dispassionate self-analysis. This is designed to identify the irrationalities of the system and initiate a meticulous re-programming of the individual. It was his practice to re-program, or re-educate, his unconscious by talking to himself in mini-lectures that would provide a rational approach to some irrational impulse, compulsion, or distortion. He offers us a specific approach and provides over sixty-five maxims that were the basis of his mini-lectures, such as the following: When a rational conviction has been arrived at ... search out ... beliefs inconsistent with [it] ... and when the sense of sin grows strong ... treat it not as a revelation and a call to higher things, but as a disease and a weakness, unless of course it is caused by some act that a rational ethic would condemn.Russell also favored directly confronting any of his fears. He rejected the normal tendency to avoid these fears, claiming that when he confronted the fears they inevitably subsided. In doing this repeatedly, they became familiar rather than startling or devastating. He says that his brain would eventually become unresponsive to a threat that led nowhere.7 With this broad concept of reconstructing the unconscious and ridding it of irrational impulses, Russell was a progenitor of what came to be known twenty-five years later, when Albert Ellis began formulating his views of the theory in 1955, as "cognitive therapy." Cognitive therapy aims at challenging a suffering individual's learnt false assumptions about his fears and guilts and re-directing him or her into more adaptive behavior. For example, in the late 1950s, the psychologist Albert Ellis developed his technique of Rational Emotive Therapy to offset severe sexual inhibitions through a process of sexual re-education.8 In the 1960s, the psychiatrist Aaron Beck and his colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania began formulating cognitive therapy for depression and anxiety. They were able to demonstrate that they could significantly alleviate these disorders by tackling the underlying distorted thoughts and illogically-acquired concepts. Beck wrote a series of papers on depression in which he showed that 16 one hours cognitive therapy sessions could cause effective remission of depressive symptoms. These results were measured against the effectiveness of imipramine (Tofranil), a leading anti-depressant medication of the time, and the results were shown to be equal to the effectiveness of imipramine. Moreover, he demonstrated that his results continued to equal those of imipramine for follow-up examinations of patients done at six week, six month, and one year intervals.9 To give some idea of what these improvements represented, both cognitive therapy and imipramine alike produced a 50% reduction in critical symptoms in 8% of depressed patients in one month, and similar 50% symptom reductions in 37% after three months, 58% after six months and in 70% after one year.10
As good as these treatment results are, there are naturally upper limits to how much rational reconstruction can help. E. Cameron provides the most extreme example in work done in the early 1960s. He and colleagues devised a treatment called "Psychic Diving." Depressed hospital patients were asked to listen to repeated recordings of their own voices intoning positive phrases and messages. This was carried out for several weeks or months in which the patients would listen to these recordings for hours at a time. In some cases, the patients heard over 250-500, 000 repetitions of their own voices. Unfortunately, while Cameron claimed this showed some usefulness, many of the patients had shrunk into greater states of despair.11 The limits to rational reconstruction are the source of two problems with Russell's techniques. He does not appreciate the therapeutic necessity for a therapist in this sort of therapy nor does he recognize the stubbornness of the fear circuits in the brain to respond to verbal redirection. The presence of a trained therapist who offers an accepting and non-judgmental relationship to the patient is critical in helping the patient to relate the narrative of their sufferings. The therapist facilitates by balancing objectivity with sensitivity, helping the patient to feel comfortable and yet able to accept advice that builds self-esteem and coping abilities. The significance of the therapist in such therapy is indicated by the fact that an untreated depression can last for eight months to over two years with considerable hardship and dysfunction compared to significant symptom relief beginning within 3-6 months with appropriate therapy.12 As for Russell's failure to recognize the limits of modifying fear responses by any sort of talk, with or without a therapist, this is easily understandable. He could not have appreciated the stubborn character of depressive fear when he was writing in 1929 as the basic work on these circuits did not begin to produce understanding of their mechanisms until the early 1990s. Only in the last 15 years has research identified the circuits responsible for anxiety and depression; this was accomplished by imaging brain activity using radioactive glucose, which is the primary nutrient of the brain. By seeing where radioactivity is concentrated, it is possible to determine which brain circuits are involved in depression and anxiety. Helen Mayberg, a research neurology professor now at Emory University, has demonstrated that depression involves a reciprocal over-activation of fear circuits in the sub-cortical parts of the brain and relative inhibition of the thinking, judging, strategizing, and pleasure experiencing circuits located in the top or cortical areas. (See accompanying illustration.)13 Furthermore, she, along with the NYU physiologist Joseph LeDoux, have shown the power of the subcortical circuits to sustain powerful fear responses long after the immediate stressors have disappeared, so that an individual that is suffering from anxiety and depression is repeatedly bombarded by the fear signals underlying his anxiety and depression. These fear responses include hypersensitivity to all environmental stimuli, heightened self-examination, and self-referencing. The heightened and sustained fear responses uncovered by Mayberg and DeLoux make sense if someone is constantly endangered either by hostile individuals or a savage environment. From an evolutionary standpoint, such a person would benefit by keeping on constant guard against emerging threats.14 However, this does not apply to the pathologically anxious or depressed. When stress sets off fear responses, they usually subside after the original stress ends, but anxious or depressed individuals experience persistent overactive signaling from the fear circuits that do not subside. Without inhibitory messaging from the cortex to demonstrate their irrationality, the fearful feelings dominate, generating an egocentrism that traps the patient in a prison of self-absorption. Fortunately modern anti-anxiety, anti-depressant and anti-psychotic drugs can normalize these disturbed subcortical circuits and restore the brain's reciprocal balance between necessary fear responses and proper intellectual evaluation. When this stability is achieved, it is possible to restore effective rational processes. However, Russell addressed himself to the plight of the functioning though unhappy individual rather than the pathologically depressed and anxious individual, and he neither had to deal with these extremes nor would the science of the time have provided him with clues as to what needed to be done if he had.
In addition to suggesting what individuals could do to free themselves from irrational impulses, Russell projected a wider, truly visionary concept of universal happiness available to those who could shed the narrow confines of a life in which selfish fulfillment was the primary objective in part 2 of The Conquest of Happiness. Russell offers a plan for genuine happiness, asserting that the values of zest, affection, the family, work, impersonal interests and resignation, along with the cultivation of broad and meaningful relationships with others and the world is what is necessary to provide on-going fulfillment despite hardships. Russell advocates connecting to a wide variety of outside interests that are readily available to the average individual, some as simple as reading about the excavations at Ur of the Chaldees or engaging in gardening.15 They could open up the unhappy personality to the rich world of stimulation and interest that never ceases. However, the egocentric, success-driving individual has largely discounted them because they appear so common. Russell retains the humanistic view that we are part of the universe's creation, with lives that have been harmonized by evolution to fit into its rhythms. To Russell, these rhythms are alternating periods of renewal and quiescence, which allow for energetic activity but also safeguard contemplation. Once the unhappy individual readjusts and starts to experience satisfaction in his family and outside interests, he will cease to be a willful tyrant, exploiting himself and others for his personal glorification, and will become instead a giving and receiving member of the community and world. Russell stresses how a life that is functioning in many areas protects that individual against the destructive effects of personal loss and despair. He contemplates how having broad-based interests can comfort one when death claims a loved one, and even offers the story of how a scientist with great intellectual desires may suffer a brain-damaging blow to his head, but if he desires the progress of science and not merely to contribute to the field, knowing that others would continue to pursue knowledge he valued, he would not suffer the same despair as would the man whose research had purely egoistic motives. Similarly, despair is more easily faced in less dramatic cases when one has interests outside oneself. Russell gives as an example of this the man who is engaged in absorbing work and is less distracted by an unhappy married life than one not absorbed by interests outside oneself.16 Russell also values equal development of the intellectual, sensual, and willful drives and warns against an unbalanced development. Not only does he stress the dangers of too egocentric and willful a life, but he also sees dangers in going too far in one-sided intellectual development or sensual indulgence. He esteems, instead, the balanced life where all potentials fit within the boundaries of health and fairness. These he sees as the formula for harmony, solidity, resiliency, and happiness.17
Despite its fundamental importance, happiness remains an elusive concept in psychiatry. According to the clinical psychologists David Myers and Ed Diener, happiness is underreported in the professional literature. In a literature survey, they have determined that of the 46,380 articles indexed in Psychology Abstracts from 1967-1994 only 2,389 or 5% mentioned happiness while depression was cited 37,000 times.18 However, this situation may be changing. According to "The Science of Happiness," which is highlighted in the Time Magazine "Special Mind & Body Issue" of January 17, 2005, academic psychological researchers are concentrating on neurotransmitters and brain regions responsible for happiness. But as is standard for the profession, they focus on the treatable individual rather than the larger society as a source of happiness.19 And in February 2004, psychiatrist Dennis S. Charney published a physiological study on the genetic basis of resiliency. In it, he concludes that those who produce the least amount of stress hormone (cortisol) and the largest amounts of stress-protecting hormones and/or neuropeptides (DHEA and neuropeptide Y, respectively) are best able to handle stress, and he calls for developing drugs that enhance these protective genes. But as with the others, he does not deal specifically with the social factors that underlie happiness.20 Finally, there are rogue elements in psychiatry that wish to make happiness into a "diagnosis of mental illness." Richard Bentall, for example, argues in a 1992 paper in The Journal of Medical Ethics that happiness should be classified as a mental disorder, because its rarity makes it abnormal. Furthermore, its association with excessive pleasure, indulgence in food, drink, and sex and propensity to produce carefree and unpredictable behavior suggest impaired judgment and impulse control.21 He asks that happiness be classified in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual as a "Major Mood Disorder, Pleasant Type."
As a practicing psychiatrist, I have found Russell's ideas about social pathology, rational reconstruction, and connecting to the wide world of possibilities important therapeutic principles. Using them, l have been able to help my patients look more profoundly at their own psychological make ups and have helped them to see the wide possibilities for feeling and action that their own contextual and personal thinking have minimized. I typically introduce Russell's ideas while at the same time offering traditional psychological interpretations about the personal conflicts that have arisen within the patients about their identity, goals, family and work relationships. This will be in cases where patients are struggling with why they are so defective, angry, guilty, or psychosomatically ill. At the same time, I have provided these patients with photocopies of selected chapters from The Conquest, including those on "Boredom and Excitement," "Zest," "Affection," "Impersonal Interests," "Effort and Resignation," and most frequently "Competition." In most instances, I have been able to help these suffering patients using this double approach. They have achieved greater personal awareness, greater hopefulness, and a sense of re-vitalization and find that Russell's words and messages are inspiring, moving them further to change destructive underlying egoistic patterns. Let me illustrate the effectiveness of incorporating Russell's ideas into my therapeutic work. A patient of mine, a 49 year-old chronically depressed woman, was struggling with her domineering and controlling 80 year-old mother, who was still very active in the family business. At the same time, the patient experienced intense guilt over defying her mother. This struggle had begun in childhood, when the mother rejected her daughter's ordinary demands for care, preferring to devote herself to friends and business instead. My patient found solace and a new perspective in Russell's chapter on "Effort and Resignation," where he recommends that one avoid asking oneself to do the impossible. She was eager to read the entire book to see what other suggestions Russell might have. A second case also involved the bitter struggle of a younger woman (32 years old in this case) with a domineering mother, who, unlike the mother in the first case, was intrusive and sought to control her daughter's behavior. I addressed this woman's compulsive compliance to her mother's wishes by focusing on her need to get confirmation from caring friends. With my encouragement she read Russell's chapter on fear of public opinion and after this began to effectively assert herself with her mother. She discovered that her mother could respond positively to my patient's newly-found self-assertion. The fiery confrontation and rejection the patient had long feared were now appreciated as fantasies created by her overactive fear circuits. In a third case, a 42 year-old anxious and depressed business man was intensely preoccupied with his past failures. He was able to shift away from these self-condemnations after I interpreted to him his mother's oppressively identifying him with his so-called "terrible" father, whom she had divorced when the patient was five. He felt that reading Russell's chapter on "Competition" helped him understand the compulsive origins of his self-hatred.
We are fortunate to have Bertrand Russell's examination of the causes of unhappiness and happiness. His recommendations about reorganizing a conventionally competitively successful life fraught with angst and despair have provided us with the remarkable discovery that happiness is our natural state if we overcome the narrow bounds of egotism and reconnect with the larger world. At the same time, we must reflect that Russell was drawn to this study when he was 57 years of age, because despite inheriting a high social position and developing into a widely recognized mathematical and philosophical genius, he was not spared life's tragedies, beginning most profoundly with the loss of both parents by the time he was four. Because he had to deal with family loss so early, the strictness of his puritanical paternal grandmother, and intense isolation growing up, he was no stranger to misery. In his long life, he also had to endure, despite much positive recognition, the hostility of peers, his jailing for pacifism during World War I, his loss of two parliamentary elections, three failed marriages, a schizophrenic child, strained economics and rejection by his university. It was humankind's good fortune that Bertrand Russell, the brilliant philosopher, was able to draw on his personal life experience with unhappiness and happiness. Forced like most people to endure what seems to be universal suffering, he used his powerful intellect to understand the origins of misery and find a universal solution for it well within the grasp of the ordinary individual living under peaceful conditions. In overcoming "meditating on his sins, follies, and shortcomings" and centering his attention upon the world at large, he found, as he writes in the last sentence in The Conquest that "it is in such profound instinctive union with the stream of life that the greatest joy is to be found."22 Like his contemporary, Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, Russell used his own life experiences to discover basic psychological truths. He was able to fulfill significantly the second of the life goals that he had formulated for himself. As stated in the Postscript to his Autobiography, in addition to wanting to find out what could be known, Russell wanted "to do whatever might be possible toward creating a happier world."23 Hopefully, psychiatry can heed Russell's 78 year old message. If so, it can recover its goal of helping individuals find happiness by again directing them to rid themselves of egoistic preoccupations and promote beneficial social and external activities even as it strives to developed new biological treatments. Naturally, Russell's more powerful message is addressed to society at large to create new social norms and programs that allow happiness to thrive, and replace the striving for profits, unlimited growth, and dominance with a fair world that offers each of its people a chance for education, health, prosperity, and pleasure.
Clinical Assistant Professor of Psychiatry |