Positive Illusions and the Future

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Leston Havens, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst at Harvard, used to ask: “Why do people celebrate New Year’s Eve? What evidence do they have that this year is going to be any better than the last?”

He was a close mentor to me, and he made this point in an article about existential depair and bipolar illness. We know that people with manic symptoms tend to overestimate themselves and to be very future-oriented. They are highly optimistic and see the bright side about everything.

That all sounds good, doesn’t it?

In fact, we’re all a little manic all the time, because we’re normal.

Normality means being a little over optimistic, seeing the bright side, being future oriented. Depression involves being pessimistic, seeing things negatively, and being past oriented. But it turns out that reality corresponds more closely to depression than to mania (or normality).

This phenomenon is called depressive realism, and its flipside is positive illusion, a feature of normality, i.e., mental health. These two states, depressive realism and normal positive illusion, have been well-described in experimental psychology studies. The research has involved the classic test group of normal college students, but also people with medical and psychiatric illnesses. The results are consistent. If people are mildly depressed (not severely so), they tend to assess their control over the environment realistically, and they prognosticate the future correctly. If people are totally normal, not depressed at all (and not manic), they overestimate their control over their environment, and they see the future somewhat more positively than it will be.

This observation is interesting because we tend to think of normality and “mental health” as good, and we think of depression as bad, but in fact the reverse is the case if being realistic is good. On the other hand, there may be some benefits to being mildly unrealistic. As Emerson once said, just as an arrow must be shot somewhat higher than its intended target, you must aim high if you are to hit the mark. Maybe in routine life circumstances, positive illusion is helpful, spurring us on to take risks, to do things we might not do under too sober consideration, things which may fail frequently, but which, when successful, obviate all the failures. And sometimes its better to be dejectedly realistic, and not pretend things are otherwise than they are, and do what we can to survive.

So we celebrate each new year, hoping it will be better than the last, and sometimes it is, and sometimes it isn’t. And the next year, we celebrate again.