This book has three major flaws that make it untrustworthy:

(1) Dr. Vaughan has chosen to review only a select subset of the research on attitudes and adjustment. She proves that optimism is a good thing (and that we ought to aim for it) by reviewing only those studies that say that. As several other reviewers of this book have pointed out, the research is much more complex than that.

However, contra some other reviers, you cannot come to a correct view simply by reading Dr. Vaughan, then by reading persons of an opposite opinion, because x + (-x) = 0. If the people saying (-x) have correctly analyzed the entire body of literature, while x is based on a very selective reading of a subset of research, "balancing" (-x) with x produces error, not balance. You come to a correct view by seeing what an accurate meta-analysis of the research actually says. It may say (-x).

(2) Dr. Vaughan's manner of applying scientific findings to clinical or real-life situations boggles the mind. Dr. Vaughan leaps grandly from studies to "and so we know" this, that, or the other about clinical or real life situations. It just ain't so.

In scientific studies, we try to limit carefully the characteristics of our sample and the variables at work. Every semi-competent scientist knows that life is not like that. Hence, we do not extrapolate directly to real life-because real life contains all sorts of variables not included in our study, and people with all sorts of characteristics that we carefully excluded from our sample.

To get from science to real life requires careful, ever-widening circles of investigation, in which we add a variable or two, or a trait or two, at a time, carefully extending the scope of our hypothesis outward. Nearly always, this process of widening the circle of investigation results in changing the hypothesis-another reason that extrapolating wildly cannot claim to be "science."

(3) Finally, Dr. Vaughan has also forgotten the basic principle that science, by the nature of the case, cannot tell us how we ought to be. It can, at best, tell us how things are and how they work, and inform us of the respective outcomes of different actions. Science does not, and cannot, show that optimism (or pessimism) is "better" than any other attitude.

Consider an analogy: Suppose someone produced a study showing (a) that men are happier when women are submissive and deferential than when women assert themselves as equals, and (b) those women who accept that state of affairs have fewer stress-related diseases than those who do not. (Such a study would not be difficult to produce even today, and a few decades ago would have been easy to replicate over and over and over again.) Would we then conclude that "science" had "shown" that male dominance is to be preferred? Of course not.

The research on positive illusions raises far more questions than it answers, and to pretend otherwise is simply-well, I guess it's a positive illusion, and a good illustration of why this approach should be regarded warily.

Whether one is "Harvard-trained" or a bubba from the boonies, the principles of science remain the same, and Dr. Vaughan's book violates those principles.

The key to Dr. Vaughan's or anyone else's understanding of optimism and pessimism is not: 'Which is better for human beings?' -- It is "Do optimistic strategies work well for some people, but pessimistic strategies work better for other people?" And indeed, psychological research indicates that for 40-50% of Americans, optimism is adaptive, but also that optimism is an unsuccessful, maladaptive, and counterproductive strategy for at least 33%. For that group of 33% + the strategy that works far better than "don't worry, be happy" optimism is 'constructive-defensive' pessimism. It is precisely because individuals differ so profoundly that 'positive psychology' is too one-sided and too 'one-size-fits-all' to be fully valid, and that is why we need the corrective found in the books on optimism and pessimism edited by Ed Chang.

So think individually about the previous reviewer suggestion: "contra some other reviers, you cannot come to a correct view simply by reading Dr. Vaughan, then by reading persons of an opposite opinion, because x + (-x) = 0. If the people saying (-x) have correctly analyzed the entire body of literature, while x is based on a very selective reading of a subset of research, "balancing" (-x) with x produces error, not balance." It is the compelling reality of individual differences in personality that matters = X works for you, (-X) works for me, Y works for my friend, Z works for your friend. So constructive pessimism fits some of us, but no single strategy fits all of us !!

Vaughan is a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and researcher who can write for the public. In my coaching practice, I sometimes have to grapple with another person's innate and deeply-grounded pessimism and this book gave me ammunition. I do believe that optimism can be learned and in my efforts to extend my own and other people's optimism in the face of some bad-to-worse onslaughts from life, this book has been of immeasurable help. From the amygdala to dream analysis, Vaughan makes it all almost deceptively simple. I doubt that many can "do it" as well as she can, but learning about changing one's level of optimism -- in fact just knowing that we can -- is a great first step! This book gave me real information I can put into practice.

This book is "science" in about the same sense that a car ad is an engineering text.

If Dr. Vaughan actually believes what she says here, Harvard ought to take back her degree. My freshman students know more about scientific method than this.

BTW, I am a strong believer in "the talking cure," but this book is no defense that any intellectually honest, aware person would ever recommend to anyone. I am just appalled. Beyond appalled.

One of the defining ways in which we might discriminate the sane from the truly deluded would be to determine whether or not the subject realizes that what he or she has written is silly irrational nonsense. Lewis Carrol was tongue-in-cheek aware that much of what he wrote was irrational nonsense; he wrote that silliness on purpose to entertain us. Dr. Susan Vaughan, on the other hand, does not have her tongue in her cheek when she insists in The Talking Cure: The Science Behind Psychotherapy that the "talking cure" she practices is "microsurgery of the mind," "neurosurgery"-not metaphorically, mind you-but literally. And she would have us believe that these 200 plus pages about her "talking cure" actually constitute genuine science rather than delusional silliness.

It would be a VERY short list of her colleague neurosurgeons and scientists at Columbia-or of any neurosurgeons or scientists from anywhere this side of the looking glass-who'd sign on to a statement that they agree that her "talking cure" therapy is real neurosurgery, or real neuroscience, or anything remotely like any kind of science, or for that matter, anything remotely like careful rational thinking.

Some 2500 years ago the Greeks reallized that it could be of some utility to construct a kind of knowing called "logos" distinct from "mythos, " and a unique mode of constructing knowledge was set in motion. Authentic science is differentiated from other kinds of thinking by a rigorous, unrelenting attention to this distinction. Novelists, poets, playwrights, songwriters, storytellers, shamans, theologians, astrologers, schizophrenics, used car salesmen, creationists, politicians, criminal defense lawyers, alien abductees, young children, and "talking cure" apologists routinely ignore any such distinction.

Susan Vaugh has written a wonderful overview of the inner workings of psychotherapy. Thanks to neural plasticity, psychotherapy can, and, if successful, does change neural pathways and brain structure. Support for this may be found in the way dreams change in the course of successful psychotherapy. During REM sleep, the reticular formation is activated and, as neurons from that area are fired, habitual story themes are creanked out that reflect a client's Core Conflict (Luborsky). As successful psychotherapy progresses, dreams change; i.e., the Core Conflict changes, which in turn indicates that the neurons fired from the reticular formation are being fired in a different way, with different pathways and patterns.