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British Journal of Guidance & Counselling
ISSN: 0306-9885 (Print) 1469-3534 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cbjg20
The Hope Circuit: A Psychologist’s Journey from
Helplessness to Optimism
Anjali Majumdar, Satishchandra Kumar & Anuradha J. Bakshi
To cite this article: Anjali Majumdar, Satishchandra Kumar & Anuradha J. Bakshi (2019) The Hope
Circuit: A Psychologist’s Journey from Helplessness to Optimism, British Journal of Guidance &
Counselling, 47:2, 263-264
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/03069885.2019.1612034
Published online: 20 May 2019.
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BOOK REVIEW
The Hope Circuit: A Psychologist’s Journey from Helplessness to Optimism, by Martin
Seligman, London, Nicholas Brealey Publishing, 2018, 448 pp., £16.99 (paperback), ISBN
9781473691636
The symposium on Happiness and Wellbeing will be incomplete without a mention of Martin (Marty)
Seligman, the founder of Positive Psychology and Director of the Penn Positive Psychology Center at
the University of Pennsylvania, USA. In a timely coincidence for us, he recently published his autobio-
graphy, which we review here.
Yet, to call the Hope Circuit an autobiography is to mislead. It is an edifying and compelling nar-
rative of the dynamic cascade of events, people, and ideas that transmogrified Marty Seligman and
the profession of psychology in tandem. It gives you an inside view of the making of psychology
across the time period in which Seligman has been active professionally, which is from the 1960s
(Seligman as a student at Princeton) till date. Although Seligman is the protagonist, the dialogical
style that he adopts to portray his strikingly collaborative life allows the reader to vicariously partici-
pate in the thought processes of three generations of (eminent) psychologists/scholars in this time
period: Seligman and his peers (e.g. Steve Maier, Chris Peterson, Judith Rodin, Carl Sagan, Ed
Diener), his mentors/seniors (e.g. Aaron Beck, Richard L. Solomon, Joe Wolpe) and his students/
progeny (e.g. Lynne Abramson, Alejandro Braun Adler, Angela Duckworth, Suzanne B. Johnson,
Tayyab Rashid). Discussions relating to atomism and rigour vs. realism/reality and relevance, heritabil-
ity vs. environmental radicalism, behaviourism vs. cognition and consciousness/mental life, reinforce-
ment vs. intentionality and will, basic/natural science vs. applied social and clinical science,
experimental psychology vs. clinical practice, hard sciences vs. soft sciences, testing theories vs.
relieving suffering, and their outcomes enliven the book and invigorate the reader.
Spanning almost six decades, multiple countries, and a diversity of scholars, Seligman presents the
positions, counter-positions, clarifications, criticisms and redressals of criticisms, debated and
reflected ideas, as also the epiphanies and intuitive leaps forward, that together comprise the con-
ception, gestation, birthing, and nurturing of a new paradigm, that of Positive Psychology. At
various points in the book, Seligman describes himself as depressive and a pessimist, self-absorbed
and negative. Almost two decades of his career were focused on helplessness, depression and pessi-
mism. As late as in 1988, he considered a question of “are you happy”stupid, and a life characterised
by zero suffering as the epitome of success. And yet the power of the question lingered and he began
to acknowledge to himself that there was a difference between “spending my life correcting what
was wrong”vs. “spending it building what was right”(p. 204), that “happiness is more than the
absence of unhappiness”(p. 206). It followed for him that, “(t)here was more to research, more to
therapy, and more to theory than just misery and its relief”(p. 206). In January 1998, he spent a
week with his wife Mandy Seligman, Mihaly and Isabella Csikszentmihalyi, and Ray and Sandy
Fowler, “inventing”Positive Psychology, that is, drawing out a game plan for founding Positive Psy-
chology. This plan was actualised by the end of 1999 with funds from Gallup, the Templeton Foun-
dation, and Atlantic Philanthropies, and collaboration with many such as Ed Diener, Kathleen Hall
Jamieson, Chris Peterson, and George Vaillant. As the scientific study of optimal human functioning
focused on identifying and promoting thriving in individuals and contexts, Positive Psychology
includes work on optimism, character strengths, flow, and subjective well-being. Seligman also
describes his PERMA theory of well-being: positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning,
and accomplishment.
Like the Selective Optimisation and Compensation (SOC) theory is one concrete exemplar of life
span theory, so the theory of learned optimism is exemplary of Positive Psychology. As indicated in
BRITISH JOURNAL OF GUIDANCE & COUNSELLING
2019, VOL. 47, NO. 2, 263–264
the title, the book simultaneously chronicles Seligman’s journey from co-developing a theory of
learned helplessness to co-developing a theory of learned optimism. What is remarkable is that
the turnaround is not just in belief or conceptualisation, neither is it overnight. The turnaround
takes a lifetime of work, but not in linear fashion. In its culmination, it is based on the rigor of neuro-
science accompanied with an intuitive leap. Pessimism and helplessness, he found (courtesy Steve
Maier), were not learnt after all. Instead, pessimism and helplessness are vestigial evolutionary
responses that are readily available: in a sense default mammalian reactions to continued threat or
stress, entailing the activation of the dorsal raphe nucleus (DRN) located in the midbrain and
pons. What is learnt is optimism! Default passivity can be overridden by learning located in the
medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) –a hope circuit in the brain, an adaptation (as Seligman puts it)
to more recent evolutionary history!
A concern that dogged him and gnawed at him throughout his career and shaped his actions was
that of external validity: in other words, the application and relevance of his work and that of research
in general to real life problems and settings. Early in his career he questions: “Hundreds of professors
of psychology make their livings teaching ‘scientific’method and statistics, the trappings of internal
validity, but no one makes a living teaching about external validity”(p. 79). Even when he had
become a renowned experimental psychologist he “believed that scientific psychology is meaningful
only if it applies to human problems”(p. 181). Not surprisingly therefore, a substantial quantum of
Seligman’s work involves applications to real world problems and contexts, including applications
to therapy, prevention, education, careers, health, insurance, sports, and wellbeing of soldiers. The
internationalisation of his applications was overseen by Seligman and/or his colleagues in countries
such as Australia, Bhutan, India, Mexico, Peru, and the UK.
With multi-layered depth, the book has something valuable for any person who reads it, regardless
of their academic background, gender, culture, or interest. At both personal and professional levels,
we were struck, for example, by Seligman’s approach to criticism. “It is much better to be criticized
than to be ignored”(p. 276), he said. He believes that criticism is crucial to progress in science.
When his work was challenged, he “tried not to get defensive. I acknowledged my shortcoming in
print …I tried to work with my critics, not against them”(p.154). Collaborating with one of his
critics, John Teasdale (1976–1979), led him to rebuild his helplessness theory of depression to
include interpretation of meaning of events/cause of helplessness as personal, permanent and per-
vasive (amounting to pessimism), as opposed to external, transient, and specific (which later he ident-
ified as optimism).
We would like to conclude our review by sharing another of Seligman’s insights that illustrates his
incisiveness, creativity and contribution: “We continually imagine different futures, we evaluate them,
we choose among them”(p. 66); “human action is drawn by the future and influenced, not driven, by
the past”(p. 353).
Anjali Majumdar
Department of Applied Psychology, University of Mumbai, India
anjalimanjali@gmail.com
Satishchandra Kumar
Department of Applied Psychology, University of Mumbai, India
Anuradha J. Bakshi
Department of Human Development, Nirmala Niketan College of Home Science, University of Mumbai,
India
© 2019 Anjali Majumdar
https://doi.org/10.1080/03069885.2019.1612034
264 BOOK REVIEW
