What You Can Change and What You Can't

Psychologist Seligman ( Learned Optimism ) here examines common psychological disorders according to their biological and societal, or learned, components. Most enlightening are his analyses of the effectiveness of relaxation, meditation, psychoanalysis and cognitive therapies in the treatment of anxiety, which, along with depression and anger, he claims, can largely be controlled by disciplined effort. Tables demonstrating the success rates of various approaches to given problems, evaluative questionnaires and mostly jargon-free prose complement Seligman's comprehensive, unformulaic discussion. Maintaining that dieting will not help people who are overweight ("Weight is in large part genetic"), the author urges a focus on fitness and health; asserting that a child's psyche heals faster than an adult's, he observes that childhood trauma does not necessarily shape one's adult life: "the rest of the tapestry is not determined by what has been woven before." Direct, instructive and nonreductive, Seligman's observations and theories are positive, realistic and sound.