"Half Empty, Half Full"
While optimism may seem a sunny subject, full of hearts and flowers, it's a weapon in Susan Vaughan's hands.

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By Annie M. Paul

May 30, 2000 | Half Empty, Half Full: The Psychological Roots of Optimism
By Susan Vaughan
Harcourt, 240 pages

Dr. Susan Vaughan's new book, "Half Empty, Half Full: The Psychological Roots of Optimism," left me with some lingering questions. Such as: If I were an optimist, would I have thought this was a good book? Given a more optimistic outlook, would I still regret the several hours I spent reading it? Is it evidence of my incorrigible pessimism that I find this book so useless?

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I'll put aside these musings for the moment, and attempt to review the book as objectively as possible (an endeavor Vaughan would regard as futile, but more on that later). As far as my hopelessly clouded vision allows me to see, Vaughan appears unwilling or incapable of making a sustained argument, something she did to great effect in her excellent 1997 book, "The Talking Cure: The Science Behind Psychotherapy." In her new work, however, she sidles up to an argument, shies away and then approaches again without ever posing a question, let alone reasoning her way to an answer.

That's unfortunate, since there's much to be said about our infatuation with genetics and how it's distracting us from good, gray environmental influences, less sexy these days, but still crucial to the development of traits like optimism or pessimism.

But this and all the rest of the book's flaws -- its painfully mixed metaphors, its phony case studies, a font so enormous and ideas so puny it resembles a large-print Reader's Digest -- recede next to its utter lack of a moral sense. Though optimism might seem a sunny subject, full of hearts and flowers, it's a weapon in Vaughan's hands: optimism by any means necessary. These means include overpraising yourself for your successes, shirking responsibility for your failures and comparing yourself to others less fortunate in order to feel superior. "Although those with a so-called optimistic style are clearly distorting reality," she concedes, they are doing so "in the service of maximizing their sense of well-being, bolstering their self-esteem and enhancing their illusions of control."

Oh, so it's OK, then. As voiced by Vaughan, there's really only one problem with mental habits like "downward comparison": "If I constantly look for others who are worse off and use their misery to bolster my sense of self," she asks ingenuously, "how do I keep from feeling guilty?"

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