I recently read Barbara Ehrenreich’s new book entitled Bright-Sided, which contains a critique of the cult of positive thinking that has swept corporate America.

Corporations spend a good deal of money promoting positive thinking in their workforces. Consider the benefits of positive thinking from a profit perspective: it makes employees work harder; helps employees to cope (however delusionally) with the loneliness and alienation that accompanies the pressures and long hours of company life (in other words, it helps “maintain discipline within a demoralized workforce” - Ehrenreich); and it allows executives and other highly paid employees to justify their successes: “I got here because I was positive-minded enough – you are not here because you are not yet positive-minded enough.”

According to Ehrenreich, one of the chief ideas in positive thinking today is “the law of attraction,” which states that good things happen to people who are sufficiently willful to attract those things to themselves. Say, for instance, that you want a boat. A positive thinking life coach would suggest that if you visualize the boat, meditate on it, and are sufficiently firm in your expectation of it, you’re going to get it because the mind attracts what it thinks.

No depth psychology that I know of would regard the practice of “willing desires into reality” as advantageous to depth experience in life. Such a view is irreconcilable with the Freudian, Jungian, and Syndetic Paradigms of depth psychology, which would see orienting life around one’s personal will as a recipe to ruin.* 

In the Freudian Paradigm, one is taught to use will to restrict one’s desires for the benefit of society, rather than seek their gratification. In the Jungian Paradigm one is led by compensatory archetypal symbols away from a focus on strictly personal needs to the realization of transpersonal meanings. In the Syndetic Paradigm one is led to move through a position of will and ego control to a position of ego strength - a position in service of the inward and outward directives of self-organizing Reality.

Say that the law of attraction really does work, when we are sufficiently willful. This scenario has a mythological analog: the story of King Midas. In this story, Midas wishes for and is granted the golden touch. But alas! Midas soon realizes that this power is not as wonderful as he initially thought, for he is unable to eat food without it turning to gold, and worst of all, his touch turns his own daughter into a golden statue. The story of King Midas tells us that playing God is not a good idea because we are not conscious enough to decide what is best for ourselves.

There is no setting that I can think of – corporate or otherwise – where unbridled positive thinking would actually serve to take us deeply into life. I agree with Ehrenreich that it is time to become more conscious of how the cult of positive thinking (and especially the law of attraction) has affected the way we view and live life. “Thinking positive” has a dangerously willful aspect to it that in no way serves the establishment of a deep and meaningful life.

Special thanks to Dr. Robert Aziz for the input provided during our discussions of this subject.

*The goal of the Freudian Paradigm is to strike a balance between our powerful instinctual passions and social norms.

The goal of the Jungian Paradigm is to secure depth meaning in life by attending to the transpersonal symbols that issue out of the self-regulating psyche.

The goal of the Syndetic Paradigm is to secure depth meaning in life by moving from a position of ego control to ego strength in our engagement with self-organizing Reality.