Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America

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Title: Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America
Author: Barbara Ehrenreich
Publisher: Renaissance Press
Year: 2009
256 pages
Audiobook.

Overbroad strokes and a sour attitude no matter what render this one of Ehrenreich's worse showings. In her contempt for the positive psychology movement, she sloppily confounds a varity of professional and pop practices, and seems to ignore the vast world of cognitive psychotherapy, which is nothing if not tediously data-rich. Ehrenreich (and to be fair, some of those she derides) seems to think the goal of cognitive or positive intervention is to live longer. It's not. What some studies do show is not gains in longevity, but a better self-reported quality of life. Ehrenreich might see this as a way to coax people to go gently into that good night, but that isn't how I've experienced it as a therapist or informed consumer. She chooses really outlandish, stupid examples without identifying them as extreme, and she ignores the huge history of stupid practices in the name of religion, vilifying psychology as if it did not derive from and in many ways reflect the field of philosophy.

I can identify with her indignation expressed in the breast cancer chapter, and found her discussion of Calvanism interesting. The others are often distorted and bitter rather than funny.

Ehrenreich's Marxism is best when she sticks to her critique of capitalism, rather than, as in Nickel And Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America, when she devolves to snapping at white women for, she reports, having more pubic hair in their bathrooms. Bright Sided may be my last Ehrenreich.