MY REAL AND IMAGINED RELATIONSHIPS WITH MARTIN SELIGMAN

Vadim Rotenberg

Professor Martin Seligman is one of the most known psychologists, author of the Learned Helplessness concept. In the present short essay I am going to present a story of our personal relationships, and on the basis of this story I will try to discuss some general psychological paradigms that determine some interpersonal relationships between scientists.

In 1979 was published in English our article with V.V.Arshavsky about the Search Activity and its influence on body resistance, as well as on the role of REM sleep and dreaming in the restoration of search activity. It was the first presentation of this topic in English, I was very excited by this publication - it was my dream to present this concept in the holistic form in English, and I have sent reprints to the outstanding scientists in psychology, psychophysiology and sleep research. I got very positive reactions from some of them, including the famous specialist in sleep, professor M. Jouvet. Martin Seligman was also on the list of scientists to whom I decided to send my article because it was an obvious connection between learned helplessness and renunciation of search. I was aware that after Martin has published his monograph about learned helplessness in 1975 he became one of the most cited psychologists and I did not expect that such a popular author will find time to write me a letter with the consideration of our concept. However I got from him a letter with a high estimation of our article. Martin wrote: "That is an enormous coincidence of topic of interest between you and me. You seem to be interested in all the same difficult and fascinating topics that I am. I also have spent some time thinking of REM sleep and have even done a few experiments on it that I have never published…I think that idea that additional dreaming is needed to compensate for helplessness or for "renunciation of search" is a fascinating one. I want to congratulate you and Arshavsky on this highly imaginative and pioneering work."

I was very touched and proud by such recognition, and we started a vivid communication (in letters, of course). His comments to my ideas were interesting and important for me.

In 1983 I got from him an invitation to be his co-presenter on the International scientific meeting in West Berlin, according to the topic of our common interests. Of course, in the period of Brezhnev I had no chance to get a permission to go abroad, even being invited on the International Scientific Congress. I had a dilemma how to inform Martin that I will not come. On the one hand, I was afraid that being not informed about the real reason of my absence, he can conclude that I have ignored his very prestigious invitation. (Few years earlier I have tried, as a member of the Organizing Committee, to invite some internationally known Western scientists including Martin Seligman on the Conference in Baku, but the Organizing Committee got no permission from the government to invite Western scientists, and I was very confused).

Moreover I thought that Martin will not have enough time to find another co-presenter instead of me and it will have a negative outcome on the discussion. Thus, I was obligate to inform him that I will not be able to come.

On the other hand, it was dangerous for me to inform him openly about the condition of Soviet scientists - that the Government does not allow most of them to go abroad. One thing was definite - my letter to the USA will go through censorship, and I could be in trouble.

Suddenly I found a solution. This is what I wrote him: " I will be not able to accept your invitation. As an author of the world known concept you can understand me". I was sure that the potential censor is not aware about this "world known concept" - Learned Helplessness.

Just after the meeting in West Berlin, Martin has send me a text of his presentation with very interesting data of experiments and his explanation of these data. And here I have made a big psychological mistake. I was so excited by our relationships and I was sure that his self-esteem as a scientist is very high (according to his achievements and their general recognition). I was also sure that the essence of the topic we are dealing with is more important for both of us than our personal ambitions. Therefore I openly asked him in my letter: "Don't you think that your very interesting recent results can be better explained in the frame of my concept of search activity than in the frame of learned helplessness concept?" (My comments to the article of C. Peterson, S. Maier and M. Seligman according to some aspects of the Learned Helplessness concept readers can find in one chapter of my article: V.S. Rotenberg "Search activity concept: Relationship between behavior, health and brain functions" Activitas Nervosa Superior, 2009, 51, 1:12-44)

For me it was not an attempt to emphasize the advantage of my concept, but an interest in the open scientific discussion.

However, this question of mine stopped our relationships. I have send him few letters and articles but got no answer. I was not sure that he received what I have sent ( don't forget that I was sending it from USSR) and finally I asked him to confirm that he got my correspondence. I got an answer in few words. He confirmed that he received all my letters and wrote that he has no comments. I understood that I have made a mistake and was very disappointed.

Few years passed. Gorbachev started "perestroika". I got a small laboratory ( for the first time in my life, as in Brezhnev period this was impossible) and after some efforts I got a permission to visit Universities in different countries as a visiting professor and as a participant in international scientific meetings. In May-June 1989 (remember these months) I come to the USA being invited to present lectures in different Universities, including the University of Pennsylvania where Seligman was a professor. I was invited not by him, but by Andrew Morrison and spend a week collaborating with him and his staff after giving my lecture.

Suddenly I got a message from Martin. He informed me that he was unable to visit my lecture because exactly at this time he was abroad but he would like to meet me when he is back. So when he came back he invited me to his house.

During the first hours of our meeting Martin seemed to be tensed and looked at me with suspicion. But I was very relaxed and happy with my successful trip to the USA, with my meetings with famous and creative colleagues, and finally Martin became also relaxed and our conversation was free and open. Martin invited me to the cinema, proposed to me to stay in his house for a night and suddenly asked me whether I would be ready to visit his department the next autumn as a visiting professor. "We can write a common article comparing our concepts" - he proposed . Of course, I was very happy with this invitation, it was an interesting proposition and it was also a sign for me that he forgave me my politically incorrect remark and that our relationship is restored. On the next morning he brought me to the University and organized my meetings with some officials informing them about his plan to invite me as a visiting professor.

I have finished my trip in USA and returned back to Moscow. I got no invitation for visiting professorship and no letters from Martin. In order to be aware about my future schedule I asked him in a letter about his invitation and got a short answer that the University refused this invitation. I was surprised how it could happen with such a famous person as Martin. However I had no time to think in this direction - I had to manage the activity of my lab in parallel to many other visits in different Universities in Europe. At the end of 1990 I emigrated to Israel. With Seligman we had no contacts for more than 20 years.

Suddenly in his last book " Flourish: A visionary new understanding of happiness" I found a very strange and absolutely irrelevant story of my visit in 1989, not quite related to the topic of the book:

"I had come home one raining winter (?!) evening in 1989 to find on my door-step (!) a bedraggled, exhausted (!) psychologist introducing himself in very broken English (! - after my lectures in English in USA) as Vadim Rotenberg from Moscow, he explained that he has just fled the Soviet Union (!?) and that I was the one and only (!) person he was acquainted with in America. Our "ecquaintance" consisted of my writing him for reprints about his fascinating work on sudden death in animals, and his then inviting me to speak in Baku, in 1979(? The real invitation was later) - a trip abruptly cancelled on the advice of the US during the sudden spike in the Cold War.

Breathlessly (?) he explained that he had narrowly escaped from USSR (?). He told me fragments of his history: he was the only Jew to have been given an entire laboratory under Leonid Brezhnev (??), since the politburo viewed his work on learned helplessness and sudden death as military significant (?!) ( It seems to me that he has mixed me with himself - in his biography in Wikipedia is information about his very long presentation for American soldiers, V.R.)

When Brezhnev died in 1982, Rotenberg's star declined (?), anti-semitism was on the rise again and things were now falling apart".

What can be the explanation of such story being so far from reality? I suppose that it is a sign of Martin's own psychological problems and defense mechanisms that have the same roots as his explanation of his dream that he has published in one of his articles. In this dream he was playing cards and cards in his hand were the best anybody can have. But when he started to put them on the table they suddenly turned into small one. Martin (outstanding psychologist!) gave the following explanation of this dream: "It means that I like to play cards (!)" However, any professional psychologist can explain this dream as a definite sign that inside of himself Martin is unsure about the real weight of his "cards", that he is afraid that his achievements are less important than they look at the first glance. And I suppose that this inverted story about our meeting is a sign of his old complex. This complex has no objective reasons: his investment in science was really very important. Nevertheless his complex exists, probably because his ambitions are even higher than his achievements. And this complex probably became aggravated by my comments to his investigations and by the competition between his and my concepts. In order to overcome this painful complex it was necessary to him to see me as a weak and dependent person who has lost everything and believed that he, Martin, was my last hope.

Such a complex is typical for scientists (and not only scientists) who got a recognition that they feel to surpass their real skills and achievements (even if objectively they have done very much and deserve the recognition, like Martin). It must be a very painful feeling that may cause an attempt to humiliate other colleagues they feel to be in competition with them.