How to Be Less Miserable, a Review

"Where does the misery come from? Wilhelm Reich asked this question in war-torn Austria, frustrated by Freud's argument that psychical suffering was mostly due to internal warfare. Reich wanted the focus turned outward, to take more of the war into account and somehow to treat social dynamics and oppression, tied to the poverty that was then regionwide."

"While Freudian psychoanalysis struggled to calibrate misery's internal and external causes, the religiously inspired self-belief that Peale marketed across North America eventually hit a roadblock with self-doubt, failure, and self-sabotage, as Freud predicted. By 1957, Peale made the pressure for self-affirmation so unrelenting that limitations began to emerge."

Misery has complex origins rooted in both internal psychological dynamics and external social circumstances. Historically, Wilhelm Reich challenged Freud's focus on internal conflict by emphasizing social oppression and poverty as significant contributors to human suffering. Later, positive psychology movements like Norman Vincent Peale's self-help approach initially gained popularity but eventually encountered limitations through self-doubt and failure. Contemporary research examines neuroscientific mechanisms underlying misery, particularly how comparison-making and self-destructive patterns contribute to suffering. Modern approaches advocate for greater tolerance of discordance, emotional complexity, and self-acceptance rather than relentless self-affirmation, recognizing that misery's causes and meanings vary across different cultural traditions and contexts.

Read at Psychology Today